I don’t think I will reinvent the wheel if I say that right now social media are one of the biggest and coolest things in the world. (If not in yours – lucky you!) Even when I look at my previous blogposts for this class all of them were somehow dedicated to social media. As I have admitted before I am personally kinda addicted to them. (my phone says that my average time spent on social media was 8 hours per day. Oopsie! ).
We have got an abundance of social media now. Some are more popular, some less. But after literally living in them I noticed one thing, that is if we compare them, most of them already have a lot of shared or similar features, which make this whole abundance kinda useless. So, having made this discovery I decided to make a small comparative analysis to double-check if it is actually so.
Our first “guests” will be Facebook and VK (VKontakte, ‘in contact’ or ‘in touch’ in Russian). The similarity is not surprising as VK was made to be somewhat a replacement and equivalent of Facebook, but for Russian speaking people. It is not only the functionality that is quite identical but what is even more striking is the outlook and how all the widgets, scripts, small icons, etc. are displayed. What is more, even the brand color for both of them is blue, not 100% matching but still from the same color palette. VK was made later than Facebook and continues to catch up with the American progenitor. Recently the Russian app has decided to try and combine even more of its competitor’s features into the app. Maybe about half a year ago VK introduced “Stories” Already sounds great, right? A tiny circle appears at the top of your feed if your friends post something. Is it also a “Hello” to Instagram? Or, if one looks further, one will discover the good old Snapchat, the founder of such a function, even though it was done in a bit different way.
Clips, a new widget, appeared just a few months ago. Even if the name of it is not too clear, one look at the icon immediately reminds of another extremely trendy platform – TikTok. Actually, if you open the tab you will discover that inside it looks even more similar, surprisingly (not).
But VK is not the only thief in this story, even if it is one of the main stars of today’s topic. Other platforms also love to look attentively at what others do and then introduce their own ‘unique’ (not) nice tiny thingies. Or not so tiny though it is all relative of course depending on how you look at it. Reels, the freshly introduced Instagram function, suspiciously looks like it has been under a significant influence of the elder brother TikTok. The idea is quite similar while the layout evokes very specific associations.
So, based on the above we can see, feel and say that there is really no uniqueness around anymore. If the apps are not clones, then they are definitely siblings. In such a case, do we actually need this variety or will one super functional app suffice? Some ‘tasty’ food for thoughts, don’t you think?
P.S.: Shoutout to Youtube – you are still one of a kind! 😊
Great topic and one that not (I think) many think about.
I had to think of this concept named the “black box”, which says that one day the media content consumed will come from a single device. I have a theory: on the one hand, technologically it is more and more likely that all media will come from one device. On the other hand, the logic of neoliberal capitalism, and competition imples that many firms continuously “invent” “new” products to make money. These two logics (according to my untested theory) imply that there will be many products with parallel, overlapping and actually equal (eventhough the most corporations do their best to portray their products as extraordinary) products and designs. Thank you for inspiring me to think about this again.