Words to the wise: I can’t help but feel like a chapter in the evolution of social media is drawing to a close. Now, surely some of this feeling is a product of my changing perspective. I got my first social media account when I was 19 years old and signed up for MySpace in college; I turn 41 later this month, and it’d be foolish to pretend that more than two decades of maturation hasn’t altered my relationship with social media. Still, there’s no denying that something has shifted. Between the haphazard-yet-thorough disassembly of Twitter at the hands of Elon Musk, the driftless and flailing “metaverse” obsessions of Facebook, and the can’t-put-my-finger-on-it-but-something’s-not-right-here vibe of Instagram these days, it’s hard not to feel like we’re at the end of an era. Social media will evolve and persist, but the monoculture days of everyone hanging out in the same few places are winding down. Like many, I feel a pang of loss for these spaces, spaces from which I’ve taken a lot in the past two decades. But I’m not here to throw a funeral. Instead, I view this as a sort of graduation. Some of us are leaving, headed for new and hopefully exciting places. Others will hang around town for a while, clinging to a moment we’re not quite ready to admit has passed. Things may be better or worse; all we can be sure of is that they’ll be different. If I can take this moment to imagine…