Before the Doomscroll: Why ZYMIX Is Putting Social Media in a Museum
From letters and landlines to endless feeds, the way we connect has changed faster than we have had time to understand it. This September, ZYMIX is inviting London to step back and look at what happened.
When was the last time you turned up at a friend’s door without sending a “you home?” text first? Or went somewhere without thinking about whether you would take a picture, post it, and check who had seen it?
Social media has made it easier to find people, share ideas and stay close across distances, but it has also changed the ordinary texture of daily life. A conversation can move between a group chat, a video, a comment thread and a direct message before anyone has made an actual plan. We can reach almost anyone at any moment, yet the expectation of being reachable can make it harder to switch off.
In this week’s ZYMIX column, we are looking at how we arrived here and asking a question that nostalgia alone cannot answer: what should we keep from life before social media, and what should we build differently now?
When connection took its time
Before the feed, there were letters that took days to arrive, phone calls made with a pocketful of coins, and television programmes you had to catch when they were broadcast. You might knock on a neighbour’s door to see if they wanted to come out, or arrange to meet a friend with no way to send a last-minute update.
None of this was necessarily easier, and waiting a week for a reply had its own frustrations. But those small gaps were part of the experience: a letter gave someone space to tell a story, a phone call had a beginning and an end, and an evening out could pass without becoming a running account of itself online.
Today, convenience has removed much of that friction. We can see what friends are doing, find a community that shares our interests and organise a night out in minutes. At the same time, we may find ourselves moving through several apps to do something as simple as making that night out happen.
The pressure of always being online
Social media was once one way to communicate but now, for many of us, it is where we discover news, follow creators, document milestones, maintain friendships and measure how our lives appear to others. Each platform offers something useful, but together they can create a sense that we need to be everywhere to keep up.
There is a personal cost to that feeling. A photograph can become a decision about whether to post, while a post can become a wait for likes, comments or judgement. Watching carefully selected moments from other people’s lives can leave us comparing them with the parts of our own lives that never make it onto a screen. Harassment, too, can make sharing feel far less casual than it once did.
The pressure reaches creators in a different way, as follower counts and platform algorithms can shape which work gets seen and how success is judged. For everyone else, the effects may be quieter: another notification to answer, another feed to check, another conversation interrupted by the feeling that something is happening somewhere else.
It would be easy to romanticise a world without these tools, but that would miss what they have given us. The more useful question is whether the way we use them today still serves the relationships, creativity and real-world experiences that drew us online in the first place.
A museum for something we are still living through
That question is at the heart of the ZYMIX Social Media Museum, which will open at Piccadilly Circus on 28 September as ZYMIX launches across the UK. Open to the public from 2pm to 6.30pm, the museum invites visitors to travel through the changing ways people have communicated, created and stayed close.
The journey begins with the physical rituals of connection, including letters and postcards, then moves through typewriters, early mobile phones and the technologies that brought social life onto screens. Visitors will be able to try familiar objects from earlier eras before reaching the present day and considering what the next chapter might look like.
Why put social media in a museum while we are still using it? Because its influence is already part of our history. In a relatively short time, social platforms have reshaped how we communicate, work, love, compare ourselves with others and remember our lives. A museum gives us room to look at those changes together: what we gained, what we gave up, and which habits we want to carry forward.
Perhaps that is part of the appeal of old phones, vinyl records and other objects finding new audiences today. They are reminders of a different pace, when every moment did not need to be instantly shared and every silence did not need to be filled. We cannot, and need not, turn back the clock to learn something from them.
ZYMIX’s vision is a digital world where people can connect with intention. By bringing chat, content, communities, events and everyday services into one connected place, we want to make it easier to spend less time jumping between platforms and more time with the people and experiences that matter.
On 28 September, the Social Media Museum will offer a walk through where we have been, right in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. What comes next is a question for all of us.
To get your free tickets, please follow the link: ZYMIX Social Media Museum