Years ago when I ran social media for a seminary, I felt constantly pulled between the institution I communicated for and the values of the media and entertainment tools I used. I remember thinking, what does using social media for a religious institution mean if success on those platforms rewards acting in a way counter to the seminary’s values? Lately, it seems these questions have only grown larger.

Being sarcastic, responding to every breaking news story, employing blunt and cruel speech, stoking public conflicts…All of these things are methods that can get us attention on social media, but they are certainly not virtues. At first, I thought, “We all need to act better online,” but over time I noticed a deeper problem: the tools themselves are far from objective, and the words we used to describe them–”social” and “media”—aren’t always helpful. So I started to deconstruct what it meant to build a “social media platform” in the first place, at the level of the words themselves.

First, platform: “Platform” is an architectural metaphor, and the first thing that might come to mind for us is a concert stage. There’s the elevated surface, the stage lights, an active performer, a listening audience. A platform is a flat surface where we gather attention and amplify our own voice.

But think of the moment when Instagram changed the central button on their app from “post” to “reels.” The result strongly suggested users to create less content and consume short entertaining videos instead. If Instagram is a “platform,” then this would be like a landlord changing out the floorboards and rearranging the seats while we’re talking from the stage. “Platform” can give an assumption of objectivity, but we’re often at the whims of media companies and their own interests for how we use their product.

There’s also the issue of hierarchy. A platform’s elevation and lighting tell us that what’s on the stage is more important, while everyone sitting in seats are passive, anonymous and valuable only for their eyes. Imagining social media as platforms, then, shapes our imaginations before we even post. Friends can become anonymous audiences, while our own lives and work take center stage. 

I’m no sociologist, but surely there’s a direct connection between seeing the world as a stage for self-performance and the rise of loneliness, social fragmentation and depression. There’s certainly a connection between “building a platform” and the isolating burden for artists of all kinds to market their work alone. How can real dialogue happen while we perform the inner monologue of our lives? All of these pressures act on us even if we consciously try to use these tools in generous ways: it’s built in. 

Likewise, it’s good to remember that words like “social” and “media” can limit our imaginations in the same ways “platform” does. We humans have always used materials (“media”) to mediate our shared (“social”) lives–we just haven’t always used our digital screens to do the mediating. In other words, we can rethink what “building a platform” means, and we don’t have to adopt the values of the media and entertainment companies in the process. So more than just being nicer online, we need to rethink the tools we use and even find better ones that work for the good of all of us.

I don’t have solutions for this, but I have been inspired by visual artists who make their own versions of platforms. These spaces foster a generous experience of art within an embodied community. Their art invites us to expand our imaginations beyond our screens and into transformative social spaces.

• Klein Arts and Culture: When Nell Gottlieb inherited an Alabama plantation, she gathered a team of people to transform a space for enslavement into a performing art space to reckon with America’s racist history. Part gallery, part living memorial, they offer art experiences to facilitate racial reconciliation using art, dance, ritual, painting, education and more.

• Sanctum: Using found lumber from the city of Bristol, Theaster Gates built a platform in the ruins of a bombed church to host a weeks-long performance art event featuring a rotating cast of local artists of all forms. I love thinking about the media here: discarded wood recontextualized into something sacred. The social aspect, too, gives an element of surprise and wonder. Instead of algorithms deciding what we see, the performance schedule was intentionally secret so the community would engage artists in unexpected ways. The audience might encounter a rousing gospel choir on one day, a quiet poetry reading on another.

• ​Project Row Houses: After Rick Lowe purchased a row of shotgun homes in the historic Third Ward of Houston, he has spent every year since turning the homes into galleries, studios, housing for women in need, and even a radio station. Here, “social media” looks like transforming homes and elevating voices that may have gone unheard without his support.

• ​​One & Other: Antony Gormley’s 2009 public art initiative invited over 2,400 people to stand on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. Each person inhabited the platform for an hour, becoming a living monument to the human life of the city, using their hour in any way they wanted. Some held protest signs, danced or waved a flag. Here, the “media” is a marble plinth and the people acting as living sculpture provokes new social questions for the city.

• The Gates: After decades of working with the local government of New York City, world-renowned installation artists Christo and Jean-Claude produced The Gates, thousands of 16-foot tall orange gates with orange fabric hung from the top, built temporarily over the sidewalks of Central Park. A simple gesture, the “media” of the gates could evoke a continual sense of welcome as people walked under them. The artists did not direct people to walk any particular way; instead their work highlighted and celebrated what might feel like a pilgrimage. 

All of these artworks and so many others remind us that our social experience can be shaped by more than news, ads, or entertainment and that media can mean more than phone screens and pixels. And when we expand our imagination for social media, we can learn to examine the tools and words we use. We can make more independent choices about the ones we want to use to build our shared future. 

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This essay is a reprint from Michael’s excellent newsletter, Still Life, which examines the intersection of art and spirit. 

Other resources he recommends on the ways public art and sacred space shape social imagination: Creative Time, Spaces, Monument Lab, and Partners for Sacred Places.