Why is social media so humourless?

An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text.

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Overview #

Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive?

Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work.

Video #

Audio #

Why is social media so humourless?

Download audio

Context collapse in social media #

Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon?

It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing.

There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media.

Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media.

As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past.

And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us.

In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold.

The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either.

They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long.

They are the first step in for modern information distribution.

An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon.

Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video.

Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops.

These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive.

Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience.

You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant.

There’s a name for this: context collapse.

It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is one of the leading academics on social media – especially the social media use of teenagers.

And the way that she describes context collapse is that, before, you’d have distinct sp