Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

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*

wow, wait till granny danger hears about this

(speaking of slack, some of my friends have also migrated there, basically group chats except it's slack; an under-remarked-upon trend of the past few years, I think, is the exodus to semi-private spaces)

FB is my lifeline to older, straight friends; Twitter is essential to posting opinions on the arts. I've adapted to them w/out a hitch. Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I admired amateurist's film posts.

The use of a medium depends on who uses it, obv. I don't get worked up enough about events to constantly post on FB or Twitter; that's what ILE is for, and even then I wait for other posters to clear the way.

the answer to the question is ultimately no unless it's a very small and contained space

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

I used to think Instagram was rubbish until I started following better people. Colleagues from ten years ago with babies is nice, but now my timeline is full of musicians and DJs I'm actively interested in.

Facebook is only as good as you curate it. I'm quite generous with the Mute For A Month button. A lot of people I know are articulate and insightful with posts in a way you can't really manage on Twitter (at least in my experience). I like a lot of publications' pages, I try to stay off their comments, and I join groups that match my interests so it feels more like using early forums.

I don't use Snapchat or TikTok because I am 32.

I really don't enjoy the unfollowing/unfriending element. I'll be the first to admit I have a thin skin for perceived rejection, even though it is always people I've met a few times at parties who I have legitimately nothing in common with etc. A lot of the dynamic is binary and much as we all laughed I think Google+ was on to something with the idea of circles of closeness.

Yes. But then again I only use twitter and it's just like ilx, really.

When blogs began (mid 90s?) I came at them as a reader with the same mindset I'd had as a consumer of print journalism and posted a few snarky comments. One particular music blogger responded saying essentially, Hey I'm not charging for this, these are only my thoughts, if you don't like it don't read it, or start your own. Whether or not he was right I took it as an IMPORTANT LIFE LESSON for the new millennium and I've kept a distance in my online interraction ever since.

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

no that's more like a description of some of your terrible threads tbf!

That's total bullshit. Most accounts are just quietly posting, they find other people and form micro-groups that exchange info on things that interest them.

Yes there is plenty of noise and grifting but with carefully curated following that's what you can get.

xp

calzino, what did i do to you? i am confused.

just carry on in peace, no beef to maintain here, nothing to see!

I answered yes but really I am just talking about fb. I like hearing from old friends. I've moved around a lot and otherwise I'd lose track of them, and I don't want that. I don't have a big extended family so I don't have nutters posting alt.right minion memes or live laugh love or whatever.

Twitter is very real-time based and you have to be in a position to jump in quickly if you're going to get anything out of it. That's not viable with my everyday non-lockdown life.

This is true for me also. I keep up with a few people about my neighborhood, but I don't understand how it functions as a place to discuss. If I blurt something out, it's not "to" anyone in particular, so why would someone else engage with it? I don't engage with others' blurts. If they asked me directly then maybe I would. I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community. And that's what I like about social media: a way to continue discussions of irl things from people I know irl about irl things (including art, maths etc)

Book Twitter is very complimentary to ILB, actually. Although some of the people that come in from blogging annoy me a bit.

the worst thing about ig is friends liking other friends' posts but not yours. don't get me started on commenting without liking. know these issues are mine, not the platform's, so this is why I patched it

Haha it’s a good thing I’m not on ig then cause I have very poor liking etiquette - fb sometimes gives me these stupid videos that say “you liked 4 posts this month!”

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.

Coping with a pandemic would be less salubrious without this virtual proximity.

I agree with both of these statements. (Assuming salubrious is a good thing.) I dwell on what bothers me in my original post, and I voted no, but--in keeping with my gray-area mindset--of course the only honest answer is somewhere in between. Obviously I wouldn't still be here or on Facebook after 10-15 years if I weren't getting positive things in return.

I don't see how there's any community there, unless it's transposed from irl community

it's the same way as everything else, you keep showing each other attention and eventually you change the status of that person from a loser nobody to someone you track through changes and become interested and concerned about to some non-negligible degree, PHILOSOPHER WHOM I HAVE BEEN COMMUNICATING WITH WITH NO SUPPORTING IRL COMMUNITY FOR YEARS NOW

see, like that. eventually you buy them beers and they donate to your gofundme when your kid gets face cancer

but how do you get to the point when you're showing attention to people on twitter that you don't know, and they're reciprocating? it just seems scattered to me. on fb I have been friended by people relevant to my work life that I've never met irl, and we can talk there; but there's an act of friending that makes "official" that we now attend to each other's blurts.

you'd be right to again point to ILX and say: look, you just started blurting on here, a long time ago as it were, and then you build, from nothing, communality with people here.

I suppose it's that I've looked at twitter enough to not be able to understand what counts as *discussion* on there, something transcending mere mutual blurting, but rather response, development, rethinking.

I mean, I've never really gotten SMS either as opposed to email, of course I send lots of SMS to say "yeah I'll pick up some bread" or "here's this story I was telling you about" but the compression doesn't lead to dialogue.

Disagree with this last.

1/ mutual follows

2/ replies lead to replies

3/ repeat interactions intensify over time (just like facebork can predict when two people are about to commence an 'official' romantic relationship)

ilx is different than twitter. people here engage with what others are saying... sort of. twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

I wish there were an option of "yes but I'm embarrassed that the answer is yes"

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