It is often said that social media is the modern version of cigarettes.  I don’t believe that’s true.

What this characterisation of the internet and its websites gets correct is that there is an addictive quality to the different social media platforms. You wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is reach for your phone. You scroll for hours on end and when you don’t have anything else to do, you revert back to it. What’s more, you also have the fact that the nature of social media as a technology is corrosive to the mind. 

The same mechanisms that make the product so successful, can be seen to both entertain and damage that user of the product. The vernacular of social media is also related to drugs. Visitors are called “users”. In this Pavlovian experiment, each interaction with social media results in a dopamine release that trains us to be increasingly dependent on the platforms for our “fix”. This continuous loop of short term gratification, low quality information and competing sources of attention essentially scramble the brain and make it difficult to concentrate on anything for a sustained period of time. Most of the great achievements of the last century have come on the other side of periods of sustained concentrated effort. So it can be concluded that the more distracted the mind, the lower the ability to achieve. Now, we can have multidimensional and multivariate interests. But during the performance of any one task, total focus on that task has been seen to be the most effective method of execution. With applied, focused effort anything can be achieved. When you are competing with a tonne of social media distractions this can be incredibly difficult.

Reading, writing, thinking, planning and executing all compete with entertainment and dopamine. It is clearly a difficult thing to account for, and as a result the relationship between social media and productive people needs a reset. Instead of self improvement, most social media gears towards self comparison which decreases satisfaction in an unproductive way. The blue light from screen saturation can both hurt your eyes and disrupt your sleep cycles, and finally the impact on shortened attention spans has a major influence on your formation of long term memories. This impact on retention quite literally reduces your IQ.

We know this. And yet we still use the platforms. Why?

Well, because we need to.

The rails provided by these technologies are incredible wealth democratisers. They enable people to reach customers, collaborators, companies alike at no marginal cost of reproduction. They bring opportunities, relationships and most importantly, money into your domain. The only thing is, those benefits typically only occur for people who sit at the supply side of the equation rather than the demand side. Creators who “supply” the market with content that is consistent, engaging and valuable end up reaping the benefits of the efforts. Those who are on the demand side are almost exclusively at a loss.

What complicates this, is that there is a lot of current affairs and information that exists on social media which people will send you and it is lubricant for conversation. Often you just want to find out what’s going on and social media will let you know. Surely not having social media therefore will keep you out of the loop, out of sight and out of mind. This does not seem to be an optimal way to live and operate - especially as a business owner.

So with this in mind, what is the appropriate mix of social media.

I would say firstly we separate social media into two things. Social and media. I’m advocating for a separation of church and state. Social, which relates to your friends, society, knowing what’s going on in the world, I think should be an activity that exists predominately off of the major platforms. It should exist on WhatsApp, in group chats, in person, over phone calls. All of the people you want to be social with should be in your phone book. Text is social. Let people surprise you with what they are up to. Speak to them often and you’ll find your life is much richer for it. That’s the first thing. The second is to look at media. Now, media is a form of two channel communication. Media can be broadcast or it can be received. Since we don’t want to receive media in this way, we want longer form, higher value forms of received media. Instead of YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, that received media can be in an audiobook, a physical book that you pay for. Typically, and this will sound a bit extreme, but media that you have to pay to consume is higher quality than media that is free. This only leaves left broadcast media, which I am calling “asset media”, media that you have produced, own, and can be considered a digital asset, as the real use of what was formerly known as “social media”.

Asset media represents a fundamental shift on how we think of the media platforms we use. Instead of using it to connect with friends, read the news, be entertained and have a buffet of other reasons for using the platforms, we compress all of the utility into one use case; which is building a bank of digital assets that bring you attention, opportunities and exchange value for audiences.

What that looks like is essentially creating series of content formats, and publishing them on a schedule that is conducive to the nature of the platform. That means tweets on X. Videos on YouTube. Videos and images on Instagram. It means scheduling time each day not to consume content, but to create it. And it means creating funnels that divert attention from the creative made towards a product, good or service that you offer. That is how asset media works. You create 20 mixes, somebody books you for a DJing gig. You create 300 tweets. Somebody asks you to write a book. You upload 100 videos, etc. etc.

Once we are aware of this, we start to think of asset media differently. We spend more time outside of it, doing the work that needs to be done and creating as a result. And then we come to the platforms, schedule the content to go out accordingly, and go on with our days. This actually creates time, enables us to do more things with the people we love, learn more and spend less time stuck on the screen.

With this extra time we can play instruments, we can cook our favourite dishes, we can go fishing, we can write a script, we can genuinely do more interesting things - and what’s more, we’ll grow faster on asset media too. Since the only people who grow on those platforms, are those who build catalogs of assets over time that compound and drive attention, sales and more in their day to day lives.

That is the name of the game.

That is the switch.

Focus your energies on creating assets - videos, blogs, tweets, etc. that go out consistently. Connect them at the end to a good or service that can be purchased. Aim to create content that can be revisited by people in a day, week, month, year and five year’s time; and consider that the asset media side of your work.