Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

What’s our working definition of ‘social media’?

I know I have laid myself open to nothing but acronyms and emoticons and links to Chris Cillizza think-pieces.

lol

For me it would be Facebook and ILX, but that would extend to the other popular platforms people use--Twitter, Instagram, etc.

😎

j. is going to single-handedly kill this thread I worked very hard to conceptualize.

Voting something in-between.

was amateurist really popular? i think not

i mean that was his charm

such as it was

I tried to cozy up to him a few times early on but he was having none of it.

Maybe popular is the wrong word. I always felt like he was taken to be very thoughtful, but I couldn't get past the tone. Anyway, I don't want this to be about him--my point was that I sometimes share the thing that drove me up the wall.

I already know I will not join commercialized social media unless under compulsion of force majeure. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Tumblr, no TikTok, no Next Big Thing Everyone Uses, even if it turns my snoot into unicorns. It's bad enough being shadowed by Amazon & other retailers, and having an Android phone.

Thank you for existing, ILX and ilxors. This is a scene I can happily join without selling myself bit by bit. (see what I did there?)

I dont count ILX as "social media", nor most other forums, even Reddit. SM is more things like FB/Insta/Snapchat/Twitter.

So insofar as Ive always loved fora and blogging (Usenet, mailing lists, blogs/livejournal/ILX), I have always sat somewhere between bored despair and outright revulsion for the rest. I'm too old (SC/Insta), or I just Dont get it (Twitter).

I log on to twitter the most because I can refrain from posting and can be anonymous and it really feels like something I can make my own very easily, also it feels like a social leveler

then instagram where I can look at my friends' posts.

I can't bear to go into my facebook account these days, I’ve been thinking about why that happened, there was nothing particularly egregious about it in my experience, I guess I’m just embarrassed to share my experiences with people I barely know

it’s much better on ilx with people I don’t at all know tbh

I love some of tiktok

I can’t sh0t any of them successfully but I try now and then. I’ve been on a discord kick for a few weeks now, it’s ok I guess.

(xposts) Age is definitely part of it (I'm 58). I think back to arguments in fanzines...You had a month to temper your response. I remember one in particular, having to do, of all things, with Celine Dion (between two other people), and I thought, wow, that's a pretty nasty exchange. It would be a shadow of an echo of a blip today.

i'm basically just wishing happy birthdays on facebook. If I posted a photo more often I'd be more in line with the majority of major social media platform users. OP describing power users/vocal minority i think

i was pretty sure this thread was going to be about the 1975

OK, I guess I'll be the pro-social media guy.

I'm reasonably active on Twitter; I use it to post links to shit I've written, or when I have a new episode of my podcast going up, and then I engage with the people I follow. (I have many more followers than people I follow - basically, I'm on there to have conversations with people I think are interesting, and anyone who follows me is the audience for those conversations, is how I think about it.) I post a lot of jokes, making fun of bands and politicians and stupid news stories and whatnot.

On Instagram, I mostly post pictures of whatever I'm reading or listening to.

On Facebook, I post some of the same shit I post on Twitter, and I comment on a few friends' posts, but that's about it. I'm also part of a FB group which has occasionally yielded professional opportunities.

For about the last decade, I have also been the social media person for my employer or for clients. I actually find "speaking" in a professional (or academic) "voice" on Twitter, FB, Instagram and even LinkedIn to be interesting, and it can be a creative challenge at times.

social media was more or less fine before it was public facing. the combination of 1. real name/identity linked to account and 2. assumption that random people you've never met will (and should be) exposed to your content turned me away from it probably forever

twitter becoming a personal brand machine for people who don't need personal brands + a supposed networking tool for many has ruined a lot of the social world for me. i can't force my brain to adjust to it and if i had it my way i would live on an island where it doesn't exist. jobs requiring people to have a professional twitter presence is obviously very bad. i don't hesitate to say it's a general evil and i don't trust people who claim it's a social good.

facebook is sort of the same. i loved it when it felt like the posts i made were for my friends. then it blew up, suddenly you're adding everyone in your family and people you barely know and even though you aren't expected to open it up to complete strangers, it still becomes a performance where you must create a version of yourself for everyone you know. i stopped posting on it when that shift happened, it lost its intimacy.

uperson you have a much more neutral approach to this than I've been able to manage

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts. it's ridiculous i know but I didn't want to be in the spotlight like that

I think that encapsulates my aversion to facebook

i listed where I actually worked for a year and posted once innocently about a raise I got. somehow, it got back to my boss as someone squealed on me for posting that.

I then changed my profile to say my job was selling drugs

haven't had it happen since

I miss the days (2008) when Twitter was an amazing thing that beamed the thoughts of kristin hersh and kay hanley to my phone

98% of my Facebook "friends" are actually professional connections - other writers, music industry people, musicians, etc. The other 2% are a couple of my relatives, with whom I never engage, and one or two people I went to high school with. Every once in a great while, my brother will comment on something I post. But otherwise, it might as well be a LinkedIn page, with dumb jokes.

I took my birth date off my facebook profile, felt really uncomfortable with the happy birthday posts.

Did the same three or four years ago--uncomfortable, and also, the worst, cognizant of who posted and who didn't. (Probably got that from died-just-as-Facebook-was-invented grandmother; she used to always keep an exact count of how many Christmas cards she got each year.) I continue to post birthday wishes myself with most people I've actually met, with a secret system that indicates how I actually feel about you.

"from my"

the creepy thing about birthdate on FB is I've had friends die and their family members didn't know how to convert their profile into a Tribute page, so casual acquaintances who didn't know they died would write "happy birthday" posts on their wall. I don't mean the "remembering you today, my angel" type posts, but like they actually thought they were saying it to a living person.

it's also creepy to see FB accounts up 10+ years after the person died, and yet...someone my age that I didn't even know died of a heart attack in 2010 (she was a friend of a friend), profile is still there, still not a tribute page, page preserved in amber from 10 years ago.

Twitter is basically my newspaper, I'm on it a lot to know what's going on and be entertained, but I have no drive to cultivate my own online personality or brand.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

Personally I think some of it is good dumb fun. Plus a lot of stuff you can safely ignore and scroll past.
And it is all, ultimately, a voluntary leisure activity. It's only in your head to the extent you allow it to be.

I understand everyone's ambivalence about social media but I also wonder whether "I don't even have a Facebook account" might become the new "I don't even own a TV."

I think it already has. See also "i have an account but i don't even use it"

kristin hersh still beams thoughts at me!

i still have a facebook profile because i need it for work, but have stripped it of everything but my name. (xp lol) should probably change my photo now that neil peart has died

started using twitter because of work and have become pretty attached, but if i missed something, it's gone; i'm not a completist. the politics/trump stuff can become draining, but that's my fault for not better pruning my follows/filters

i'm on no others, which, i'm told, is where the real shit happens now. it's fine; i'm pretty old

85% of my relationships started one way or another on FB, usually because I'd start a convo online and then wouldn't feel so awkward talking to the person in public.

xp -- true! if only it was just that (these were the days when tweets were sent as SMS messages to your phone)

(at least in my circles, a lot of people have migrated to Discord, which feels kind of like a happy public vs. private medium)

jill hennessy liked one of my tweets so can't nobody tell me nothin about social media, forever

Yah the kids in my house are all on discord. It seems to be akin to a cross between a forum and a sort of IRC?

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

the highlight of my Twitter career was zinging Prodigy of Mobb Deep and having him laugh at it

RIP

we've probably all been retweeted by Lil B at some point?

he linked back to the ILX thread ten years ago!

also Ripper Owens was upset that I dismissively mentioned his blip of a career in Judas Priest in less than illustrious terms

don't like the name discord, it sounds alt-right to me

keep thinking it's a typo for dischord

It took me a couple of tries to come around on the film, but I think one of the best representations of how bewildering social media can be is the "Orinoco Flow" sequence in Eighth Grade--even if, in the context of the film, it simultaneously shows how adept this 14-year-old girl has become at navigating that world.

I dip back in now and again for like half a day and then I remember that social media only makes me depressed and anxious and then I extract myself and towel off and hope I've finally learned my gahdamn lesson already.

xp -- yeah, that is a major issue the platform has (partly because it was originally geared toward gamers), but it's like slack in that it is primarily based around servers/channels, so it is siloed in that regard, obviously I stay far away from anything like that

Last time I tweeted I said Twitter made me feel so left out, I felt like Flagstaff Station on a Sunday.

A friend replied "Actually Flagstaff's been open on Sundays for years how behind are you?"

*kills self*

a third I met last year. he was the infamous L0rd V1c of alt.rock-n-roll.metal.metallica who in the 90s would troll people and create Metallica quizzes full of obscure trivia and insulting people when they failed. he and I were adversaries then, out of the blue in 2022, he messages me under his gov name on FB to say he's reformed himself and rid himself of all of the bad people he used to hang with in the scene, and said if I still bore any resentment, he'd understand. but I didn't and we chatted and he's actually a good dude now and I met him in Atlanta seeing Mercyful Fate.

perhaps the most bizarre one....there was this complete dude in the 90s who used to post on USEnet as M1k3 M0sh in the metal forums, he was kind of a weirdo, overenthusiastic, occasionally posted questionable shit. him and I posted in the same threads on alt.music.slayer but didn't really have many convos, but he said he lived in FL - a bit I remember because when another poster found out he was going to the same show I was, he asked M1k3 to kick my ass for him.

like many, I left USENET like...in 2002? and 2015 rolls around, and I'm at a Deicide show talking to this dude for a bit (drunk af) and we get around to introducing ourselves and he says his name is "M1k3 M0sh". man, the look I must have had on my face. like not only are you this weirdo from USEnet, but you actually call yourself by your handle in person. I still don't know his real name. I don't even think his first name's M1k3.

Every ILXer I've met is as awesome as me.

when i was speaking, i said "autekker"

― z_tbd, Monday, 27 November 2023 15:58 (twenty-seven minutes ago) link

quick google supports that ("Sounds like aa · teh · kr")

fuck yes

i grew up on the internet. i learned how to interact with other people on the internet, how to communicate with other people on the internet. initially, i found it a relief. all of the interpersonal skills people wanted me to have in real life weren't necessary on the internet. i could talk to people on the internet about myself, about my interests, i could be _vulnerable_ on the internet in a way i couldn't be in person
i think that... i've done a lot of work over the past few years in particular on learning to express myself in a healthy way. interpersonal skills have their benefits. my dream of the internet was a place without borders, or any other kind of boundaries either. boundaries are a lot more important to me than they used to be.
i have problems setting my own boundaries sometimes. it helps me to be in an environment that has healthy boundaries.

i def relate to this and have thought about it a couple of times since you posted. my initial reaction was to think, well, i've always been grateful that i grew up before the internet. that is, i've tended to overlook the tremendous influence it's had on how i interact with people because it shaped my adolescence but not my childhood. lol.

in my childhood i had the Aspergers trait of becoming very fixated on an interest to the point of obsession, and i liked to spend a lot of my time going to the library or newsstand and reading, or researching the things i was obsessed with. i usually preferred that to socializing with other kids. a lot of the time, my friends were the kids who were willing to take up those interests themselves in order to become my friend. if they weren't into exactly what i was into, i wasn't interested :(

iow, i wasn't finding the connections i wanted among the local kids my age. i didn't want to settle for what was on offer, and no one presented anything that drew me out of my own inner world and enticed me to step into their reality. That changed when we got the internet. I made long-distance friendships that I was much more invested in than my friendships with local kids.

and i think that stunted my growth because i never had to develop the kinds of interpersonal skills you're talking about until much later, if at all. it's only in the last few years that i've begun to see interpersonal boundaries as healthy or desirable, and have come to recognize that not setting them is largely what made it painful for me to have relationships. I'm turning 40 in about 2 months, and my 30's in retrospect have been a process of finally getting in touch with my feelings, through Yijing divination especially. because i was hopelessly out of touch with them before. that was the thing i really wanted and felt i was missing.

and i'm sorry this post is unfocused and indulgent and that it's taking me a long time to come around to a point- which is that i wasn't interested in internet as a contained "place". the appeal of the internet, to me, was the potential for the colorful imaginings that were proposed and put into circulation online to be borne out in physical reality. and actually, there's another thread i want to bump about this, re: a flippant Tom Ewing post from 20 years ago. But the internet seemed, at the time, to be making the physical world more open.

i see my connection to ilx as perpendicular in many ways. i think i stick around because i like most of the ilxors individually, even though i'm not always thrilled with the "hivemind" here and my interests overlap only somewhat with the topics that come up on ilx. but it's specifically *not* a place for me to geek out over my obsessions, to the degree that i still become obsessed with things, which is diminished.

i think our definition of what a "local" community is has to change to accommodate the reality we've lived with since the mid-late 1990s, and that it should include your immediate connections in online spaces regardless of geographical distance. in that sense ilx is a much more localized space than a social network where you're getting viral uh, transmissions from people who might be many degrees removed from you.

Interesting.

I very much did _not_ grow up on the internet. It did not meaningfully exist for most normal people until 1993-1995 or thereabouts. By which point I (and my age peers) were pretty much solidified in our ways. Ostensible adults, some with mortgages and marriages and children.

When we "went online" (via Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, or whatever) we went as our predigital selves.

I don't have a real point here, just saying how generational it seems to be.

I graduated college in spring '96, got an AOL account that summer, started grad school in the fall. My development as a queer man and writer would be inconceivable without the internet's ability to coax me into creating fictive selves.

(I was 21-22, just right)

xxp Yeah like the time i was more invested in the long-distance friendships (not strictly online, because we met irl) was brief for the reasons Kate said, but formative. So that in high school or thereabouts when i started to become more excited about the irl friendships than the ling-distance ones, i didn't know how to relate to others in a healthy way or meet certain expectations. i was approaching them more like virtual relationships. Kate is def onto something.

My development as a queer man and writer would be inconceivable without the internet's ability to coax me into creating fictive selves.

OMG love this

my first serious "band" was an internet based electronic/post-rock thing of sending files back and forth. one of the people was a very prolific composer and technically accomplished musician. another was a non-musician whose role was to dream up abstract imagery that she wanted the music to sound like. i was somewhere in the middle :)

it was very exciting compared to, you know, playing blandish alt rock with kids who went to my same high school.

I have a similar story to you Deflator, though I have the benefit/responsibility of a 9 year old son who, I'm starting to realize, is exactly like me. and I'm trying to figure out exactly what that means for him growing up in the internet era where you can just dive into any random obsession you want without having to feel too weird about it. I'm not sure if that's good or bad actually. One thing I've been able to successfully do is point him towards sports, since the way I see it if you can talk about sports you can make friends anywhere, and I think it's real important for him to have irl friends. I didn't have a whole lot throughout most of my teen years - what opened me up so to speak was alcohol.

I very much did _not_ grow up on the internet. It did not meaningfully exist for most normal people until 1993-1995 or thereabouts. By which point I (and my age peers) were pretty much solidified in our ways. Ostensible adults, some with mortgages and marriages and children.

When we "went online" (via Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, or whatever) we went as our predigital selves.

I don't have a real point here, just saying how generational it seems to be.

― ; Powell (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, December 4, 2023 4:00 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

something I've gotten obsessed with lately is the Found Footage Festival stuff - mostly because it's funny, and it's nostalgic because it's from an era that I do somewhat remember, but there's a third thing - it's fascinating to see how people made video content in a pre-internet era. they just talked differently, there wasn't really the constant sea of memes and references like you see today, there were no real 'templates' so you had to do everything yourself, plus they seemed way less self-conscious, maybe because you don't have that instant feedback loop where you post something and someone tells you immediately to go kill yourself (obviously most internet spaces aren't like that now but there was def a time when things were a lot rougher and I think getting told off by a bunch of strangers can permanently affect the way we put ourselves out there). I guess you had a lot less of a sense of what you were doing 'wrong' which maybe allowed you to get really enthusiastic about a topic in a general matter instead of within its own niche like you would today.

xp otm. the shift occurred when i started getting high.

yea kind of a big one for me too since that really opened my mind up to understanding the idea that everyone's got their own reality and that your own personal framework can only give you so much of the picture and that feeling has really stuck with me sick

stuck with me since I mean. I'm not sick from the knowledge of other people

I have a bunch of stuff to say about your posts, frogbs, but need to organize my thoughts.

Early Youtube virality was really about bullying people who had "less sense of what they were doing wrong" in a slightly different way to how you mean it.

"if you can talk about sports you can make friends anywhere" is something i really want to come back to, though i suspect that if Kate sees this she will do a lot better than i could.

the thing about wanting to have a space without boundaries that she talked a bit about, and that i also experienced- i think it ultimately comes from the adolescent loneliness of feeling like nobody understands you and wanting your connections to be based on a deeper mutual understanding. you can "have friends" and still feel alone.

My development as a queer man and writer would be inconceivable without the internet's ability to coax me into creating fictive selves.

? (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, December 4, 2023 2:08 PM

For me this is at the root of my... complicated relationship with the Internet as a social force.

I looked to the Internet as a place where I could express and understand myself in ways that weren't available to me as a weird teenage nerd in suburban New Jersey. It offered a lot of possibilities that I hadn't had before.

It didn't offer me a lot of role models in terms of womanhood. Particularly in terms of queer, trans womanhood. I found that dressing femme was portrayed pretty much exclusively as being a male sexual fetish associated with shame and humiliation. This wasn't something I could relate to. I didn't find womanhood to be shameful or humiliating - it was something I aspired to. I had and have sexual feelings, but I was (and am) repulsed by the idea of being a male sexual fetish.

Through most of my life I've craved a sense of _belonging_, craved being able to express myself authentically around other people and be accepted for it. I did, in fact, find that through the Internet! It was genuinely good for me, socially. There was always a caveat, though. Looking back, I don't feel like I had the opportunity to explore or express myself genuinely in terms of gender, sexual attraction, or romantic attraction, even on the relatively safe, "anonymous" terms of Internet communication.

This wasn't something unique to the Internet by any means. It was no different, really, from basically the rest of the entire world at the time. It _could have been_, though. Should have been. I truly believe that there were just as many trans and gender diverse people of my generation as there are in younger generations. I believe that we collectively were - and to a great extent, still are - denied the opportunity to explore gender in ways that caused many of us, including myself, significant detriment.

In terms of the effect of the Internet, I _didn't_ experience this in the way we understand "transphobia" today. There were genuine trans voices on the Internet in those days. I can look back and see them. When I was a teenager, though, those voices were drowned out by a narrative which focused exclusively on male sexual fetishism. I wasn't interested in being a slur, and on the Internet of that time, I didn't see any alternatives.

I'm glad things are different today. I'm glad younger people exploring their gender have positive role models, have access to gender-affirming narratives and not just slurs. I wish that when I was younger, I'd had the opportunities they have now. At the same time, well, I radically accept it. Nothing I can do about it now except be the change I want to see in the world.

maybe because you don't have that instant feedback loop where you post something and someone tells you immediately to go kill yourself (obviously most internet spaces aren't like that now

― frogbs

they are if you're trans :(

I believe that we collectively were - and to a great extent, still are - denied the opportunity to explore gender in ways that caused many of us, including myself, significant detriment.

ugh grammar. ok let me redo this and maybe the meaning of this bit will be clearer

I believe that we collectively were - and to a great extent, still are - denied the opportunity to explore gender. I believe being denied that opportunity caused many of us, including myself, significant detriment.

the rules of X/Twitter seem to be, lately:

1) begin your post by clarifying that you obviously do not believe this obviously horrible thing that monsters believe before making your point
2) spend the rest of your tweet thread defending yourself from people claiming you actually do
3) block all of the responses from Crypto Bots
4) hide all of the drop-shipping ads

I could never survive on Twitter because I like to make jokes with as little context as possible and not explain them

oh no jokes require a 5 page guide

Underworld - Classic or Dud?

Underwear - Classic or Dud?

i finally broke down and got an insta this weekend. at a certain point it becomes kind of like not having an email address - it makes one very difficult to get in touch with. there's sort of a generational aspect to it - millennials use insta, zoomers use tiktok, boomers use facebook. gen x use, uh, messageboards i guess?

a lot of gen xers of FB from my experince

on FB I mean

I have a friend with teenage kids and I asked them the other day "do any of you have a Facebook account?" - two of them said no, the other said "I have an account but it's only to talk to grandma"

Facebook is the CBS of social media

-John Lennon

a lot of gen xers of FB from my experince

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

i mean typical gen x, even our social media is a boomer hand-me-down

From what I've seen Gen Alpha (those born after 2012) communicate with one another solely through gaming console chat

one of my best friends is 15 years younger than me and it's so weird looking at her statuses from like....middle school.

so glad this wasn't a thing when I was that age. back then, you wanted to talk trash, you had to download your Juno emails first and then upload your hate-filled responses.

When I was that age we had to chisel messages on stone tablets and have them delivered by pterodactyl.

Then later we got cuneiform on wax, that was a bit better.

(Actually what we did was have a really long phone cord so you could take the phone into your room.)

I visited my MySpace profile recently, it felt like that scene towards the end of inception where DiCaprio incepts to that crumbling memory city.

We created. We built the world for ourselves. We did that for years. We built our own world.

How long were you stuck there?

Mid 2005 to early 2006.

Jesus. How could you stand it?

It wasn’t so bad at first, feeling like gods.

lol

and to think MySpace actually gave you much more customization latitude

When I was that age we had to chisel messages on stone tablets and have them delivered by pterodactyl.

― CthulhuLululemon (Ye Mad Puffin)

when you think about it, wasn't the first usenet post really that complaint tablet to ea-nasir?

and to think MySpace actually gave you much more customization latitude

― STUPID CRAP FACE (Neanderthal)

super hot take here, corporations controlling the ways in which we use the internet to communicate is a bad thing

"ok, I used the internet! but i was only on the internet to find out how to get off"

heh-heh he said he wanted "to get off" (/beavis)

They told me 'Get on' and I got off. Ooooooooh Growing up.

I tried to sign up for Facebook recently (in order to send a message to a barber about arranging an appointment for a haircut)

Its impossible! Whenever I tried to sign up it immediately says "We've suspended your account 180 days left to appeal or we'll permanently disable your account", this is with completely new gmail account

I remembered I'd signed up a couple of years ago, and fished around to see what I'd signed up with. This one seemed to work but couldn't remember the password, did password recovery and got stuck at a "something went wrong" screen

I walked to the barbers and made the appointment in person instead. I am not cut out for social media

lots of businesses only have FB pages for information, so if you don't have social media, you essentially have to rely on third party information about them i.e. Yelp.

then you show up and they're closed because the third party site had the hours wrong

I use FB for restaurants and it's stunning how much they get incorrect sometimes. not only are the hours all wrong but they'll also have a screwed up menu (or one from 10 years ago), plus the wrong phone number. used to be restaurants often had their own website for this but everything's on social media instead these days. definitely feels like information online has gotten a lot less reliable over the last 10 years. oh well, I'm sure AI will fix it