Social Media Ruined Social Climbing

Popularity didn’t used to be quantifiable.

- Maureen O’Connor

“How did people even measure popularity before social media?” I asked idly while a friend was cropping a selfie for Instagram. “They didn’t,” she replied. As she refreshed the app to watch the first wave of “likes” roll in, I felt a stab of nostalgia. Remember when popularity wasn’t quantifiable? Remember when “trends” were subjective, before there were algorithms to calculate them by analyzing words typed into search engines and shared Facebook posts? I miss the days when the most stressful thing about popularity was the sheer uncertainty of the whole enterprise. Back when popularity was cool and aloof, identifiable only by the feelings of desire, envy, and yearning experienced by those who looked upon it.

Today, there is no mystery. The metrics of popularity are pervasive and unavoidable. News stories, video clips, music play lists— everything comes with view counts, share counts, and crowd-sourced ratings. If you look up an address on Google, you see a rating of the location. (My subway stop has 3.9 stars.) If you order dinner on Seamless, you’ll see tabulations of popularity and quality. (If a two star sushi spot has been rated a thousand times and is still in business, it can’t be that bad, right?) If you add a new contact to your phone, Facebook will announce how much social overlap you have. Some messaging apps even force you to confront the mechanics of popularity head-on—Snapchat compares how much you message your friends versus how much they message you, and assigns heart and side-eye emoji to your contact list accordingly.