NEW YORK — Once upon a time there was a brief outage on some social media platforms. It was resolved. The end. At first glance it’s a boring story.
But the widespread attention given Tuesday to the shutdown of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms suggests another, perhaps less obvious story: the one that shows that social media platforms like the books or newspapers or the insert medium of other times in history are more important than just an entertaining pastime.
Wait, you mean those posts from that cousin you rarely see, sharing updates on her kids’ lives? That film by the influencer that introduces you to a culture or piece of knowledge you’ve never known? That photo collage you hung in memory of a loved one whose loss you are grieving? The back-and-forth debate between people on your feed trying to follow up on topics that interest you?
Yes. The technologies may be recent. But the things we use them for? That takes advantage of something age-old: people are programmed to love stories. They tell. Listen to them. Interact with each other and with our communities through them. And lately, we’re showing them to the world piece by piece through our devices – so much so that one of Instagram’s main features is simply called ‘Stories’.
“Our storytelling ability is… one of the best ways we can connect with each other,” says Evynn McFalls, vice president of marketing and brand at the NeuroLeadership Institute, a consulting firm that integrates neuroscience into its business work. “Our brains like stories because it makes it easier for us to understand other people and other circumstances.”
In his book ‘The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human’, scientist Jonathan Gottschall says: ‘The human need to create and consume stories goes even deeper than literature, dreams and fantasy. We are soaked to the bone by the story.”
And in these times, social media is talked about so much – whether it’s photos, videos, memes, text threads, or mashups of all four. People can get news and information (and okay, yes, misinformation) there, learn and possibly sympathize with the problems of others, see things in ways that help us understand the world. We tell our own stories about it and make connections with others that might not exist in any other space.
In many ways, these social spaces are where we are “human.”
“It’s almost impossible for many people, especially in the United States, to think about their lives and communications without thinking about social media,” said Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media.
So what if they get disrupted? Oh oh. Connecting wires can disappear. Endorphin-generating activities are cut off. Routines – for better or for worse – are interrupted, and the expected flow of information and stories falters and falters.
“Beyond the trivial nature of these platforms, they have really transformed into an advocacy space over the last fifteen years,” says Imani Cheers, associate professor of digital storytelling at George Washington University in Washington, DC. really cause disruption in the transmission and service of information.”
It can also magnify the impact if the outage occurs at a time when communication and information is thought to be most needed, Woolley notes: In the United States, the outage corresponded with when many were heading to the polls for Super Tuesday.
“Even though the recent outage only lasted a few hours for most people, it still resulted in a lack of access to news,” Woolley said. “And that is a problem.”
After the outages occurred on Tuesday, Meta’s head of communications Andy Stone acknowledged the outages on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote. But for some it was more visceral than simple discomfort. Their stories and their online lives were at stake.
When Taylor Cole Miller, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, first realized Tuesday that he couldn’t access his Facebook account, his first concern was security: that he could somehow had been hacked.
Soon after, a creeping panic arose: what if he had lost almost twenty years of his Facebook existence, including some connections with people he only had through the platform?
“I hesitate to say my life flashed before my eyes because it’s just so overwrought,” he says. “But the fact is, as someone who has been on Facebook for 20 years, a significant portion of my life is archived there.”
“A lot of the ways I connect with people is purely through Facebook. What happens if poof, it just disappears really quickly? What does that mean for who I am as a person and how I interact with other people?”
Those kinds of reactions about losing something so part of a person’s daily fabric speak to the power of story to connect us, says Melanie Green, a professor of communications at the University at Buffalo. And not coincidentally also on the platforms that amplify those stories.
“People have a need to belong. We are a social species and our survival often depends on being part of groups,” she says. “Stories can help us feel that sense of connection.”
