How Social Media Changes What It Means to Be a Writer

"The demands of social media and writing... sit awkwardly next to each other, when they are not flatly contradictory"

Detail from “Portrait of a Merchant” by Jan Gossaert

I’ve been writing in the current format (online) and on the current topics (culture, politics etc) for a long time, but I’m old enough to remember what it used to be like to be a writer in the early internet age. In those years I was writing fiction. You bought a copy of the Writer’s and Artists Yearbook and mailed your short stories (I hate short stories) off to little magazines that no-one read in the hopes that if you were successful at that enough times, you could get a publisher or agent interested in a novel you had on the go. It was a very different experience.

Looking back feels like peering through a fog. That’s because in every part of the process - coming up with ideas, working on drafts, getting feedback - you were working in isolation. Others like you were out there somewhere, and you maybe heard the distant echoes of their voices sometimes. But the act of writing often felt like pouring your words down a well.

Thank God for technology, right? In 2025 every writer uses social media as their primary way of interacting with their audience, driving research, generating and workshopping ideas, building and engaging with the public, finding a supportive community. I’m very appreciative of what social media has done for me on all those fronts, as I assume is anyone else who lived that change. But I’ve noticed that it’s making writing a struggle in ways that are becoming difficult to manage. I’m also noticed that it’s changing what writing itself actually is.

Using social media as the primary prism through which we experience writing, changes the latter from an expressive exercise to a social one. This is true for both writers and readers, but especially the former. It mixes and confuses the purely writerly impulses with the ones related to social status, networking and popularity. It also mixes the incentives and the experiences of being a maker and those of being a consumer, making everyone a little of both. On one hand we have the drive to write interesting, insightful and new things, or to say things in a new and thrilling way. On the other we have the drive to be popular, sociable and high status. They sit awkwardly next to each other, when they are not flatly contradictory.

Social media turns all expression into a content-token we trade for purposes of maintaining or improving our place in a social hierarchy. The primary use of any piece of writing on social media becomes that of a badge of enmity or friendship. How someone look if they repost this - more interesting or less? More likeable or less? In on the joke, or a clueless boomer? Higher or lower status in my little group? The incentives lead inexorably away from just writing or reading something good. Maybe this is what it was always like. But there is an industrial quality to the way that social media refines and intensifies urges in writers that have nothing to do with writing.

As well as funnelling all effort into a narrow range of motives, it does the same with the range of subjects. To work on forums like twitter and substack is to be part of the discourse, which means always being involved in the minutiae of ephemeral political and cultural argument. Social media is about jockeying for position, and your stance in relation to an ever-changing discourse is how you position yourself, with all that implies - the process rewards shallowness, hysteria, performance, volume over quality.

There’s a reason why journalists were so often both the earliest adopters and the heaviest users of these apps. Spiritually, the apps universalise amongst users the mindset of the journalist, the gossip columnist, the hack. You are continually under the gun of the hated word count, the hated deadline, flailing around to be ahead of the next big scandal and the one after that. It’s a system designed to produce a particular kind of writing, to the exclusion of everything else.

Social media also changes your reading habits, which are vital for a writer. My personal experience is that reading (along with walking) is one of the two ways that you fill up the well you draw on in writing. The negative effect is twofold. Once fed through the social media press, the reading impulse as with everything else gets bent towards the Current Thing and to maintaining social position in a subculture. These are terrible reasons to read. Whereas a writer might previously have let his interest roam whatever direction it wanted, you will now inevitably find yourself drawn only to those things that can be repurposed as content, because you know that speaking or knowing about this topic or being informed by that writer will make what you write more popular amongst your little in-group. It narrows your focus and your frame of reference. It’s ok to read about current events and stay on top of the news (please continue to do so, o subscriber) but this is one reason why everything you read seems so cramped and repetitive, with the same references and ideas recurring again and again.

The other end of this problem is that it puts you in a state where you are too distracted and agitated to read anything substantial at all. In writing, good things only come up from the deep, and in their own time. Putting your ideas on the posting clock doesn’t hurry them along, it just ensures they arrive fragile and undercooked. Without prolonged thought and a mind resistant to distraction nothing you write will be any good. All of these are known problems but my interest here is in the person who suffers them but continues to produce, because they are compelled to by disposition. That’s the dilemma.

What can you do about any of this? The solutions - or maybe mitigants is a better word - are the same ones you hear all the time in relation to the general problem of social media’s impacts. Making an effort to read things that have no relevance to the discourse, or that come from such a different time and place that they represent a discourse-proof mindset; turning off podcasts and putting away phones when you’re doing routine things (especially walking anywhere) so your mind has time and space to wander; making a point of writing some things over a long period, with no deadline, and preferably not for public consumption, to refresh the part of your mind that likes writing for self-expression and not public performance.

A central fact about regular writing is that, except in very short bursts, it is a massive pain in the arse. The only fulfilling part of it is the 36 hours after you’ve completed something, and it is certainly never conducted in a joyous spirit. The ecstatic writerly state of TV show montages, sitting in a garret pounding away on the keyboard with sparks flying off, never happens. The default feeling of writing is one of running on empty. That is exactly why experiencing it through the lens of social media is such a problem - you are instsiting that drudgery is delivered in a package that can only accommodate excitement, novelty, froth. Something has to give, and it’s usually the more difficult thing.

A final thought. If you sense this article has been an extended whinge by someone who is finding writing a challenge at the moment and wants to have bitch about it, you would be correct. But as I said above one of the subtlest changes wrought by social media is that it collapses the distance between audience and creator, and in doing so collapses the distinction. With the exception of a couple of dedicated lurkers and haughty old-school writers, everyone including me is some mixture of the consumer and creator. I don’t spend much less time thinking about my tweets than I do about my articles, and in many ways they’re the same thing.

None of that is a complaint - I like it. But since everyone is a little bit of a writer, the platforms universalised the worst psychological traits of writers amongst all users; the pressure to create, the sense of constantly pushing against distraction, the fear of audience abandonment, the obsession with metrics and so on. Awareness of those problems, and finding a way to combat them, shouldn’t be a concern just to people trying to make a living from it. When it comes to posting, we’re all professionals.