Is ephemerality the key to creating healthier digital spaces?
One social media platform not giving me anxiety is Somewhere Good, an audio-first platform that according to the platform itself “feels more like a kickback, than a feed.” The colourful, dreamscape user-interface, created by Annika Hansteen-Izora and their team, has their touch. It’s ruminative, welcoming, and clear.
Each day, the platform drops “seeds”, which are special prompts inviting you to contribute. There is one seed behind each of the four portals. Each portal encompasses an arena to connect over things we hold close: artistic practice, future organising, culture, and current affairs. Every “seed” or prompt invites you to participate by sharing a short audio clip (as intimate as a voice note.)
Prompts include broad-based provocations like “what does self-documentation look like” to questions that elicit intimate answers and inspire emulation like “what is your morning routine?” A recent response to a prompt a few months ago evokes what is different about this app. The prompt asked something to the effect of ‘what does knowledge gathering look like for you?’ An answer to the prompt someone left: sharing and educating.
Prompts are sometimes informed by partnerships. In late July, Somewhere Good hosted a week-long collaboration with Black Women Radicals and Feminists for All, two local feminist organizations in support of the second annual Defend Black Women March. And in September, Somewhere Good announced upcoming changes to its platform.
Somewhere Good seems like a natural next step for founder and Brooklyn-based entrepreneur Naj Austin, who previously founded Ethel’s Club, a co-working and creative space for people of colour. Named after her grandmother, intimacy, family, and a personal touch are present in her digital space as it was present physically in her space on Meserole Street. The digital incarnation too is built for people of colour. Austin remains driven to build community at the intersection of our ‘offline’ and ‘online’ lives, with Somewhere Good now taking up space with an IRL location in Bed-Stuy. A plush, welcoming, and *free* space, both incarnations of Somewhere Good rest on the premise of building a melanated utopia of sorts.
What makes Somewhere Good different? Is it a healthier option to what is now a collection of platforms that inspire anxiety, mindless scrolling, and low attention spans, empty discourse and lip service?
One observation is that the difference may lie in ephemerality. Your posts only last for the day — from when you post them to when the next “seeds” or prompts are dropped. And the app itself is free from the anxiety-inducing feedback loop that has become the norm: that is, likes, engagement metrics, RTs, etc. (Though users can react to each other’s voice notes with select emoji.)
A study conducted by Instagram and commissioned researchers, studying the interaction between humans and computers, found that more ephemerality may allow for healthier, more authentic contributions to social networks.
The research, entitled Hashtag Forget: Using social media ephemerality to support evolving identities, consists of an eight-day diary study where teenagers were asked to document their motivations when posting on social media. Concurrently, respondents were asked to complete a short questionnaire when they did want to post something to Instagram, questions included: what type of content the respondent wanted to share, why, for how long, and whether they did in fact post the content. The results of the studies suggested that allowing young people to share or post something for a small amount of time allowed them to feel more free to post. Content that would stay up for longer — think posting on the grid — made them feel vulnerable to judgement or even just beholden to a viewpoint that they may grow out of. (This reminds me of how my younger Gen Z cousins post now; if they post to the grid, it is usually an esoteric collection of blurry or zoomed in photos. With their new photo dump posted, their previous collection is archived so that my cousins’ account only ever has one post to the grid at any time.)
The choice to study teenagers is intentional because those years are the most formative — where we are shape-shifting physically and philosophically. It makes sense for younger people to not want to document every thought or their appearance at a time when it’s bound to be outdated quickly or amorphous. Sharing these benefits across age, outside of just younger users, may be part of Somewhere Good’s goal.
Perhaps, these younger people are also deeply skeptical of forming a digital trail at a time of mass data retention and targeting. These benefits of ephemerality may extend to all users: particularly users of colour, LGBTQIA+ users, and others who may want to minimise their digital footprint to avoid scrutiny of their expression. We can and should agree that creating room for our ever-evolving identities shouldn’t just be offered to youth and we’d all be better off if our viewpoints, ideas, and beliefs (within reason!) were subject to change, growth, and evolution.
Of course, there’s a downside too. Ephemeral content may pose inconveniences to users seeking resources, if they were shared on expiring stories or contributions. (That’s perhaps whyInstagram introduced Highlights, a way to have expiring content be documented for as long as the user wants.) And not unsurprisingly, ephemeral content isn’t a silver bullet for other harms on the internet. People may still post illegal, defamatory, misinformed, and otherwise harmful content on expiring posts which could result in content moderation challenges if the post is seen and makes an impression on a user but the platform is unable to detect it and take action on it. Furthermore, allowing speakers with platforms, think politicians, to share ephemeral content raises archiving and documentation issues. (Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, Ethan Zuckerman and others have written compellingly about ephemerality and scale.)
Somewhere Good joins a host of other platforms, like BeReal, Twitter’s now dead Fleets, and TikTok’s stories, trying out ephemerality as a mode of engagement. But, free from excessive notifications and over-stimulation, Somewhere Good’s focus on ephemerality is only part of the platform’s intentional attention to care.
Ultimately, Somewhere Good will face its own kinds of hard questions. Content moderation and related adjudications of what to and not to host is what keeps the internet specific, vibrant, and spam-free. Legislative red-tape, limited capital funding opportunities for entrepreneurs of colour, and fickle user behaviour will apply pressure on even the most well-funded and popular apps.
But, for now, I’m happy to be on Somewhere Good. It reminds me of what the internet should and can be: creative and built with care.
Hi, I’m blogging again (albeit infrequently) — read what/why/when/how here.
