Not a fan of the social media

Social Media Reflections Rant

I don't think social media is pure evil.

I'm willing to admit there's a possibility that it can be beneficial.

• Allowing families and friends the ability to stay connected across continents.
• Providing small businesses an expanded audience.
• Offering individuals a powerful tool to widely share their thoughts.

Social media platforms are powerful tools. But, tools for what?

Unfortunately, these tools are shaped by the systems behind them and those systems are built on the attention economy. The outrage machine has learned that polarizing, emotional and extreme content catches our eyes and keeps us scrolling. We become more valuable to them with every swipe and every click.

Algorithms, hungry for engagement, decide what we see. Comparison becomes constant and leads us to curate, filter and optimize everything (for reasons that we'll all have to face for ourselves). It's widely understood that our online interactions are tracked. Our behaviors are then harvested, aggregated and monetized. We're the mice on the ever spinning wheel - and to make it worse - we're helping build the tools that keep us from getting off.

Somewhere along the way, people started to feel like experiences only counted if they were documented online.

As a former high school teacher, I had a front-row seat to some of these costs. I saw anxiety amplified by likes and comments. I saw friendships ruined by screenshots. I saw young people measure their worth against highlight reels.

Of course, just because I was an adult, didn't make me immune from these challenges. Social media didn't create every one of humanities problems, it just seems to have made most of them worse.

For me, digital community cannot equal or even attempt to replace community in the physical world. I'm all for real world conversations over digital displays. Sharing that is based in actual experiences over curated mirages. When digital spaces begin to overshadow life, so many important things are lost.

And yet — here's the honest tension — I do maintain a small presence on social media. I use it sparingly, intentionally and often begrudgingly. It's there for me to highlight collaborators, celebrate meaningful projects and acknowledge the businesses and events I'm grateful to work with. I'm trying to use these platforms as tools, not as a lifestyle.

AI in Social Media

AI is quickly being woven into all aspects of social media. Increasingly, it will dictate how to 'improve' the algorithms based on company engagement goals. Deciding what will show up in our feeds, who we should follow, 'kindly' offering to create images, videos and posts for us.

Choice after choice, after choice.

Given away.

Today's social media lost its way a long time ago and part of why JoRo Visuals was started was to help us reconnect with ourselves and our communities.

Our continued participation in these negative societal changes raises an important question for creative work. How much of the process should belong to artists and how much to our tools?

AI in Photography

In my own photography, I'm choosing not to rely on AI as a standard practice. As new cameras can take an increasing number of photos-per-second photographers can get stuck juggling whether to click less and potentially miss a shot vs being buried by thousands of images to work through. Again, enter AI to choose the 'best' shots for us automatically.

Culling my own images is part of the craft — it's where I learn from mistakes, revisit moments, notice subtleties and decide what truly matters in photographs.

Intentionally surreal shots aside, editing is also about honoring what was actually there. With a thoughtless click today's editing tools can change the direction of the sun's light. Add, remove or replace people and objects from an image. Alter a person's physical shape and features. Many of these abilities have existed for years, but only recently have they become baked into automatic workflows or applied with 'magic wand' icons. Most AI-driven tools are built on datasets shaped by decades of narrow beauty standards and unrealistic ideals. As AI models are increasingly trained through social media, these 'guidelines' will build on themselves narrowing the rich diversity of our humanity. I'm cautious of technology that so quickly and quietly reinforces those biases or creates a version of reality that feels more manufactured than remembered.

For some, outsourcing these choices in the name of efficiency may outweigh the loss of control. But for me, photography is about presence and feeling — not "perfection" according to an algorithm.