Is Thinking Aloud Ok On Social Media?

There’s an old saying I came across as a writing tutor in grad school: You don’t know what you know until you write it down. In other words, until we externalize our thoughts, we really have no idea what we think or believe. Thoughts that remain in our head are untested, unchecked, and unprocessed. They haven’t been given an opportunity to stretch out. No matter how revolutionary or radical, a thought that has yet to be externalized turns out to be more mental fluff.

In this way, writing has been essential in how I gain insight and process my thoughts. By externalizing my ideas through taking notes on what I read (lots of notes!), writing a newsletter, blogging, or, in the past, creating posts on social media platforms, I have seen how my ideas behave among other ideas I encounter.

As a medium for gaining self-knowledge, social media should have been the ultimate playground for me. Simple but attractive (and addictive) tools like Reels, filters, playful text options, and multimedia in-house apps make a platform like Instagram ripe for creative expression, a sandbox where insight into my own beliefs could have taken shape. In some ways the platform seems to be built for the purpose of external “scaffolding” (as the knowledge workers call the process of externalizing yr thoughts). But, as anyone who’s spent time on the platform knows, externally processing your thoughts on social media can be far from a pleasant experience.

The fact is, social media is antagonistic toward the outward processing of information. It is inhospitable to knowledge work. In short, social media is a dangerous place for thoughts to take shape.

Because Instagram is rooted in the proliferation of conflict where “the biggest assholes get the most attention” (Lanier 2018), the “commons” that people participate in is wrought with resentment, anger, one-upmanship, and distrust. But, this is only half of the story. As I’ve said in the past (many many times [sorry!]), the content we see on Instagram is based on branded selves, curated projections outward of who we believe we are and who we want others to think we are. The problem is that brands are inherently static. Their strength is in their ability to be recognized from a distance. In order to do so, a brand needs to be reliable, coherent, and stable. That is, the opposite of most of most human beings.

But, what happens when the static, stable, branded self is mistaken for the person behind the brand who is by design fluid, changing, sometimes finicky, and often curious? 💣 Disaster 🤯 This squirrely individual is invisible on Instagram. And, when this invisible entity behind the curtain strays from their brand by changing up their content, posting at different times of the day, or not posting at all for a few weeks, they are punished by having their “reach” radically curtailed. Anyone who’s seen their Views and Likes drop after taking a social media detox can surely attest.



Those of us who use social media are mostly complicit. In the hyper-capitalist era of all-encompassing Spectacle, we find ourselves equating a person’s self-brand with the person behind the veneer to the point where what a person says on social media becomes synonymous with who they are, a discrepancy that goes against everything we know about how we process information externally. This is in part how social media becomes an inherently hostile environment.

When I was on social media I felt this tension, these impulses and “nudges” daily, all the while trying to “get more Followers” and “grow my account.” Locked in step with the dominant, capitalist economic model almost every nation in the world abides by, I saw “growth” on social media as the only pipeline leading to “more opportunity.” Most of the social media users I knew who were attempting to leverage their accounts for IRL gains believed the same thing. As Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics shows, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, people in almost every sector equate growth with potential income, more leisure time, and more, well, growth. On Instagram, more followers meant more eyes on one’s shared content, which was believed to yield more opportunities IRL.

For better or worse this is partially true. Compared to the bigwigs, my meager 2000+ Followers on social media may have led to book sales and sold-out classes, but opportunities for collaboration, where real interpersonal “growth” occurs, where ideas really begin to take shape, were hard to come by. People were simply too busy trying to sell themselves to think about building something with others. After all, Instagram is a seller’s market, not a diversified one. It’s where people come to hock identities, not collaborate on projects.



And yet, the platform almost demands to be used otherwise. Despite its inherent flaws, the platform is actually quite beautiful. The mechanics of the Instagram platform—the ability to externalize thoughts and ideas by funneling them through a variety of different learning-language mediums (text, image, video, sound etc)—gives Instagram so much potential as a tool for gaining self-knowledge. The functions Instagram provides are constrained just enough, forcing users to be clear and concise (though I was often neither). The functions allowed me to make things attractive, they allowed me to cut up and remix ideas so they fit within the limited dimensions of the screen. Doing so helping me see things from new angles.

To think…. There’s a platform out there where you can take an idea that’s been banging around in your head, type it out in a variety of fonts, add imagery, video, and sound, link it to other ideas through tagging, put it out so your friends can comment and build off of it, and then you can do it all over again ad infinitum…. How awesome that would be!

Alas, it is only a dream…. 🌴