Last week, Derek Muller of Veritasium, who makes some awesome physics-y outreach videos, took to his secondary channel to complain about social media:

Coincidentally, I had heard a lot of anti-social-media talk the previous week at the annual Renaissance Weekend event, so I was thinking a bit about this. And Muller’s video nicely encapsulates a couple of the things that bug me about the genre, so it’s a reasonable jumping-off point for talking a bit about why I find these anti-social-media posts more annoying than helpful.

There are basically two lines of argument in the video for why social media is a problem, the first of which is that what you see from friends and acquaintances is a curated slice of their actual lives, chosen to project a particular image. I don’t disagree with that at all, as a statement of fact– outside of a handful of people who are totally committed to documenting absolutely everything they do, everybody on social media is deliberately projecting a particular image as a deliberate choice.

The problem I have with this as an anti-social-media argument is that this isn’t anything new. Everybody does this all the time, in person just as much as online. We choose our clothes, our accessories, our conversation topics to project an image of ourselves as we would like others to see us, and try to hide the things we’d rather not have everyone else know. All that social media is really doing is making the artifice unmistakable– it’s not the media part of “social media” that makes this happen, it’s the “social.” We curate a public image on social media because projecting a particular chosen image is what people do when interacting socially.

The second line of argument is the common complaint about people with phones not being sufficiently “in the moment” of whatever they’re experiencing, because they’re too busy trying to find the angle for the perfect selfie to post to Snapface or whatever. I have two issues with this, the first of which is pretty much the same as with the first line, namely that this is actually a social phenomenon, and nothing new.

Muller implicitly acknowledges this when citing a Kahnemann piece about photographs and memories, which was written before ubiquitous cell phones and social media. But having done a lot of solo tourism in a lot of places over the years, I can assure you that this kind of thing has been going on for decades– the absolute number of people taking photos may have increased thanks to the rise of smartphone cameras, but twenty years ago when I was in Japan, you’d see huge lines of people at major tourist sites waiting to get their picture taken in just the right place.

But the other thing to notice about this is the behavior of groups of people who aren’t on their phones all the time. You’ll most likely see that they’re not focused on their surroundings, either, but on each other. That’s because most people are social by nature, and like to experience things as a group.

And that’s a huge part of the selfie-snapping thing– the phones are a way to expand the group experience beyond those who are physically present. People who are taking photos and videos for social media are doing it to include their friend groups in the (curated) experience, and the comments and likes they get are an extension of the social chatter you get among groups. When I’ve been to cool places with family and groups of kids, the people are an essential part of things: the look on my kids’ faces at seeing a humpback whale dive, or the ridiculous joke a friend told on a tour that became a part of our repertoire of cryptic inside references, or the giant water fight my uncle initiated back in the early 80’s at Zion National Park. In a lot of cases, I remember some of those social human moments more clearly and fondly than the external experience we were there to share.

And that kind of brings it around to the other piece of this second argument that gets up my nose, which is that it’s essentially policing the aesthetic experience of others. It depends on the idea that there’s some ineffable authentic quality to an experience that can only be appreciated through total concentration. If you’re thinking about camera angles, or friends on the Internet, you’re Doing It Wrong.

Now, I’m not denying that putting the phone away and concentrating on being “in the moment” is a different aesthetic experience, and one many people find preferable. But ultimately, like all aesthetic matters, it’s a highly subjective and personal phenomenon. If people derive enjoyment from the social aspect of sharing their experiences, good for them. It’s really not my business to correct them.

When you get down to it, I even question the fundamental premise that the act of taking photos for social media is necessarily something that detracts from an experience. As anyone who follows me on social media knows, I take a lot of photos, and I’ve actually found that I observe a lot of things more carefully as a result, and enjoy some things that otherwise would be kind of bland. Looking for just the right shot, and how to frame and capture some piece of what I’m doing is an enjoyable process for me, and heightens my appreciation of what I’m doing more than it distracts from it.

That’s not to say there aren’t issues with social media, as a whole– there are huge issues with managing the scale of these mediated long-distance contacts, and with abusive behavior. But I don’t find these specific arguments against social media especially compelling– the behaviors in question really aren’t anything new, just perfectly normal human social activity.