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It hadn’t always been this way. Something must have changed for them somewhere. They just couldn’t work out what.
They could still remember a time when they only used Facebook to find out what had happened to their school crushes, and when Instagram was little more than an archive of people’s holiday snaps. Since then, they had followed the many evolutions of those websites from their dual perspective as both interface designers and users. They could name every single update – the introduction of likes and notifications, video sharing, picture posting, tagging. But any attempt to draw a connection between those minutiae and the way in which social media had spread through every aspect of their lives was so reductive as to miss the point entirely, like wondering whether it is at the first twig or the third tree that a forest can be said to be on fire.
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