You might be reading this article on our website, but it also happens to be our first Substack article! First of many, we hope. Check out our Substack here, and make sure to subscribe. Some content we do will be exclusively on Substack, so make sure to follow us over there.
Now, the fact that this is our first Substack article is not entirely incidental. The idea is that it marks a kind of paradigm shift in the way we do, think about, and engage with social media. This shift is as much a consequence of everything happening around us in the social media world as it is something that comes from our own evolution as a studio. A perfect storm between the two. And this is exactly what we wanted to work through in this first piece of what will be a longer series - on why, how, when, and where we want to show up online; trying to make do in a space that is complex, layered, and, frankly, pretty hard to figure out.
Now, the idea of a “digital detox” has been around for so long, it’s nearly become a trope of its own. Pay 500 € for a weekend, and, for the price of a new-generation smartphone, you can have your device taken away. Net result: €1,000 down, one slightly smug LinkedIn post to show for it.
From screentimes creeping upward, doomscrolling becoming a recognized verb and “brain rot” the word of the year, to no one meeting in person anymore, and getting your news from Instagram - social media has become, in the popular imagination, the sign of a civilisational decline: an unequivocal bad: a "necessary evil" we all have to put up with in order not to disappear into some kind of luddite void. And increasingly, minimizing the time you spend on these so-called "social" platforms is becoming a status symbol, a mark of luxury - the modern equivalent of not owning a television. All to say: the dominant narrative is that social media is bad. And since we can't do without it, the goal becomes to minimise the time, effort, and money you spend on it; maximise the impact. In this framing, reach, visibility, likes, engagement - it all becomes a race to the bottom. In a place no one wants to be, every move needs to count.
OK - enough cryptic doomsday talk for today, though. We all know social media is far from the utopia it never promised to be. We're increasingly aware, increasingly critical. We've all heard the adage, which comes from a 1973 film, "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" - and yet, we continue to use social media, produce for it, build on top of it. New platforms emerge carrying fresh ethical scaffolding and a stated commitment to align with our needs for genuine digital communication. We think of platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Are.na, Substack - and what they represent is not a rejection of the idea of social media itself (i.e. remote connection through shared feeds, ideas, culture, conversation); but a rejection of the specific ways that dominant platforms handle and instrumentalize users and their data, turning them (us) into the product, of the ways in which some of them reward virality over truth, outrage over nuance, performance over substance - the list goes on and on, and so do the references, from documentaries, to books and digital artworks. There’s so much to disagree with - and yet, especially as a design studio working with clients across the world, from all kinds of industries and contexts - opting out is not a solution. The thing is, life isn't that binary. Choosing to use, maintain and create for social media doesn't mean we endorse everything these platforms do, or what their figureheads stand for, or how they're engineered to capture and hold attention. But it also doesn't mean we're reluctantly bending to the iron fist of technofeudalism and tech-oligarchs, willingly slipping our hands into handcuffs because the only alternative is to follow the trend and forgo our own values at its expense. Instead, it's about “staying with the trouble” - to borrow from our beloved Donna Haraway - making do within a complex web of ethics and contradictions, and using creativity and intentionality as the tools through which we can navigate, evolve, and actually say something. In much more eloquent wording, Haraway writes,
It requires learning to be truly present not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.
These ideas have crystallised as a kind of perfect storm, as we find ourselves at the intersection of two simultaneous shifts: a general cultural shift in how people think about and use social media (how the perception of it, and what we seek from it, has moved away from the binary, and, as digitally native Gen Zs come of age, toward something a lot more layered and interesting); and a shift in our own needs, desires, and ability to communicate as a studio.
Let's start with the wider zeitgeist. More and more people use social media as a way to understand and emit thought, discovery pages become search engines, and more and more people get their news exclusively from social media. It allows people to encounter projects and ideas based on proximity of interest - through the algorithm, not just through physical or geographical accident. Of course, social media of all kinds is not without its flaws, but there are genuine pockets of hope out there, proof that not everything will devolve into an infinite loop of TikTok dances, soap-cutting videos, or AI-generated brain rot. This is precisely the kind of logic that allows platforms like Substack or Are.na to exist (and some areas of TikTok too!) Interesting thinkers, academics, practitioners reaching audiences they could never have imagined through traditional channels. Thinking critically about it, questioning our own practices, looking for alternatives - this has moved from the margins into the mainstream. Influencers give tips to “avoid brain rot”, social media accounts become platforms for its critique. Some of our favorite social media references have perfected this format through carousels or reels that seek to help us think more critically of the platforms on which we encounter them - beyond the irony, if spending some amount of time on social media is a given, might as well have it be more educational too.
This also comes at a time when social media functions as genuine infrastructure - a necessary tool for social mobilization, for activism. Yes, couch activism or “slacktivism” is a real phenomenon. But if recent events in Nepal or Iran are any indication, social media is not an optional component of how new social orders are built and contested every day. And more and more, there's a growing recognition that with a platform comes responsibility - something that can lead to backlash, but which ultimately goes to show that social media is not the antithesis of thought, culture, or reflection. In today's world, it can be one of its settings.
On the other hand, our renewed thinking on social media reflects how we've been evolving as a studio. We've been around for thirteen years now, sharing on social media since the very beginning...
It's also something we work on with clients: campaigns, identity, strategy, analysis. We've watched the platforms change, the discourse shift, the communities form and dissolve. We've grown our following to a point where it's no longer just clients, friends, and people directly connected to DDS, it's the general public too. Some brushes with virality, posts that traveled further than expected. We share things online because we believe that there's a genuine space for them, genuine interest from our followers and those who receive our content on their feeds. Therefore, with our platforms where they are now, and the desire to grow them further, comes the responsibility of approaching social media with more intention. It's no longer just about optimizing content to get in front of the maximum number of people, because we already, if we can say so ourselves, have the beginnings of an online community. It's about reinforcing, understanding, and growing those communities; being deliberate about what we do and how. We have the privilege - and we use the word carefully - of not having to follow the rules blindly just to get visibility. Which means we can start, to a certain extent, to define our own game. Research has become central to who we are, and so has the question of how we think, not just what we make. In this dimension, social media can’t just be a portfolio window, but should instead morph into a place to show that we think about things. That we think about things.
So what does all of this actually materialize into for us?
- Being intentional with attention. The problem with social media is how platforms instrumentalize and compete for your attention, which becomes the ultimate merchandise. Capturing a user's attention for a brief window is akin to getting them to buy a product - at the expense of their time and mental energy. So doing social media in a way that feels right means being careful and mindful of this: using our platforms judiciously, trying to create genuine value, disseminate thought and reflection, being parsimonious with content and trends. Jenny Odell says it well:
"I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together."
- Exploring other platforms. Substack, Are.na, Bluesky - spaces where the founding ideologies align more with ours. This is why we've started on Substack: we've encountered brilliant articles, fascinating thinkers, and a genuine desire for knowledge and learning that moves away from a certain performativity. One of our favorites: Neocities, a social network of personal websites, where online creativity and “weird internet art” galore. New platforms ideas also exist as more theoretical, conceptual frameworks - some academics have theorized the idea of a “prosocial media” network, structuring and prototyping social media platforms so as to actually form connections between people, create social bonds.
- Being creative with the format. How can we subvert what these platforms expect of us? Games, unexpected formats, small interactivities, visual surprises. Social platforms can be played with and turned against their own logic - from little visual "ahas" to larger narrative ideas, there's a whole practice of working with and against the grain of the format that we want to keep learning from. Some fun examples:
The format is a constraint - and constraints, as we know, are interesting.
- Critical engagement. Writing articles like this one, recognizing complexity and partiality; acknowledging that things may change; staying informed. It's a genuinely interesting space, and we want to do a similar work of self-reckoning here as we've been doing around AI over the past couple of years. Finding, reading, and engaging with critical takes, staying educated on the mechanisms and theoretical frameworks. And, where relevant, sketching out our own.
