Are we living through the age of fame without talent, or has social media simply given people opportunities they never had before?

Saf and Zoheb look back at how social media has changed from the days of Hi5, Bebo, MySpace, BBM and BlackBerry to a world where TikTok, Instagram and everything else follows us around in our pockets.

They get into whether life was actually better when you had to go home and log on, why so much of life now feels like it’s being performed for an audience, and what happens when attention itself becomes something people can turn into money.

There’s the influencer with a ring light in a restaurant, people sitting on TikTok Live asking strangers for gifts, the rise of people becoming rich and famous without any obvious talent, and the flip side of all of that: social media has also helped genuinely talented people get discovered, created careers that didn’t exist before and given ordinary people access to opportunities they may never otherwise have had.

They also talk about the UK’s planned under-16 social media ban, online safety, children growing up permanently connected, gaming platforms, trolls and whether social media has made it harder to separate the loudest people online from what people are actually like in real life.

And, because this is The Side Room, the conversation somehow also gets into Michael Jackson, old Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones, BlackBerry Messenger, Floyd Mayweather, a Bollywood singer getting suspended from Twitter and whether Saf and Zoheb could take Mayweather in a two-on-one fight.

Would either of them choose to keep social media if they had the option to get rid of it completely?

A note on the conversation: The views expressed in this episode are personal opinions, recollections and conversational commentary from the hosts. References to people, events and wider issues are not presented as verified factual reporting and should not be treated as such.

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