I’ve noticed that most of what I consume on social media does not stick with me. Even if you were to ask me at the end of the day what I learned from my doom scrolling, I could probably only recall 2-3 posts, and even then, I probably won’t remember much the following day. However, there are occasional posts that stay with me. Something they have in common is that they all have an emotional pull to them. It is never a statistic or an infographic, but rather a person telling their own story. This is what we call sticky online content — something that grabs someone’s attention and sustains it.
In today’s day and age, attention is the hottest commodity. It is how you grow, expand your business or campaign, reach larger and more diverse audiences. It can be used for the public good by bringing issues to the forefront, and making it feel personal to those who may not otherwise be exposed to it. This is why I think personal narratives are so crucial when it comes to activism. You can’t campaign on just statistics. You need to show people how it impacts their day-to-day lives, how their actions can help those in their community, how it can make the world a better place to be in. When you create this emotional connection, that is when things really click and people mobilize.
One of my mother’s favorite quotes is, “People won’t remember what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel”. I think that concept applies to social media as well. A post becomes sticky when it leaves some kind of emotional imprint behind that alters the way someone feels or views something going forward.
I think one of the more valuable aspects of stickiness is that, at best, it can help sustain compassion rather than just provoke quick and emotional reactions from people. Many of the biggest social and political problems we face are full of nuance, and that can be really challenging to communicate through formal policy language alone. Personal stories help translate those issues that are easier to connect to. In the case of the DREAMers movement, someones does not need to understand the ins and outs of immigration law to grasp why DACA matters when they hear directly from a person whose entire sense of home, safety, and future depends on it.
At the same time, this exact characteristic may also be its greatest limitation. It may foster this sense of certainty, which is only intensified when emotions get involved, that blocks someone off from understanding the nuances involved. A post may be powerful and moving while only presenting one slice of a much larger and complicated issue. I think this is why social media can promote echo chambers (Cinelli et al., 2021) and an oversimplification that leaves viewers with a strong sense of moral certainty and little room for nuance.
On a personal note, I do feel like this fight for attention has gone too far at times. I have seen sticky content spread everywhere, only for people to realize later that it was misleading. I have also noticed that my own emotions feel a little blunted post-2020. I don’t know if this is just overuse of social media and strong involvement in those campaigns at the time, but I don’t really feel surprised by much of what I see online like I used to.
Overall, I do think stickiness can be a force for public good when used ethically to build empathy and humanize issues that would otherwise be distant. The same qualities that make content memorable can also make it manipulative, and that’s why I think it’s so important to remain skeptical of everything we see online and use social media in moderation.
References
M. Cinelli, G. De Francisci Morales, A. Galeazzi, W. Quattrociocchi, & M. Starnini, The echo chamber effect on social media, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118 (9) e2023301118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023301118 (2021).