I get annoyed when people complain about the banality of social media. There’s been a meme going around Facebook (I’ve seen it twice now, with different things):

The idea is to occupy Facebook with {THING}, to break the monotony of selfies, knominations, cat dog pics and personal videos. 

I have no idea what knominations even are (typo? game? annoying website?), but that’s not the point. The second version of the meme used different items to complain about. And it’s absolutely true that most social media shares are essentially banal — tidbits about people’s lives, whether it’s their cat, their lunch, or a picture of them with their bestie.

I don’t know about you, but I actually like that. Maybe I’m excessively sincere and easily pleased, but I absolutely love people’s vacation photos, cute pictures of their kids, cats, and dogs, and great captures of beautiful moments. When I can virtually travel back to my home state through the eyes of a semi-professional contact because of Facebook, I’m delighted. I’ve terrifically enjoyed watching my friends’ yard transform from a treasure trove of buried bricks and other oddities to a container garden and lovely patio. It’s great hearing tidbits from people’s lives that I otherwise wouldn’t be in touch with (distant high school acquaintances), getting a culinary tour of New York from a friend who relocated there, or finding out how someone’s new job is going or new baby is growing even though they’re too busy or tired or far away to come and visit.

Even the not-so-personal banal is often amusing. I know Buzzfeed is problematic, but I’ve never laughed harder in my life than at their collection of Reddit’s “first sexual experience” gifs. A friend of mine posted this imgur thread recently, which sent me on a probably hour-long laughing fit as I read all the comments (well, all the top-level ones). Life is hard sometimes; spending that much time laughing is precious. Yeah, I didn’t spend that time reading a meaningful novel or contributing to a worthy cause, but life can’t entirely be made up of serious things. (Besides, I’m not short on my quota of meaningful novels read this week.)

Besides enjoying individual posts, the experience of social media in aggregate is the experience of community. Community isn’t only made up of what’s serious and weighty; in many ways, the online social spaces that we occupy play a role in our lives that’s similar to the role the town common and other real-life social spaces formerly played (and still do, to some extent), places where we connect with family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors on a daily basis. Is it better for that role to be played by real space than virtual space? The reflexive answer is yes, but really the question is something that can be answered empirically to some extent, and the answer is likely to be multifaceted. The nature of the medium is that it’s more one-to-many than one-to-one, but comments and other conversation mechanisms reduce that tendency a little, and there’s advantages in producing a single piece of high-quality content and having it sent around to many people.

I’ve been a part of many online communities. Some were unhealthy, but most have been fundamentally enriching experiences, full of interesting conversations and surprising connections. Most of the communities I like best encourage more depth than Facebook and Twitter, but haven’t had the same advantage in connecting me with people I know in real life as well.

Finally, there’s a larger objection to the notion that Facebook and other social networks are banal, which is that while they mostly are (and that banality becomes significant only in aggregate), there’s a significant amount of substantive interaction that goes on as well — meaningful articles are shared, opinions exchanged, protests made and coordinated. Life is mostly banal; it’s not surprising that social media reflects that. But social media also carries high-quality information and interactions, if you keep looking for them. I try to cultivate my networks so that I get what for me is the right balance between the two. If you aren’t getting the right balance for you, keep looking. And keep sharing music or whatever it is you want to see more of, if that’s what floats your boat. But don’t moan about other people preferring to share their personal banality with each other, because whatever you think of it, it’s not without value.