Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

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"

twitter is a bunch of people preening for attention.

An analysis as perceptive and fact-based as "Twitter? Who needs that? Nobody wants to read what you're having for lunch!"

Anyway, the answer is 'no'. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account fwiw.

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.

i miss having substantive discussions via email so much, which for me completely atrophied with the rise of smartphones & social. there are so many people that I used to have interesting & fulfilling email correspondence with that i'm still in touch with, but our interactions gradually changed to 100% texting, which is almost entirely vapid variations of "[meme/article/YT link]"->"haha". (Its a two-way street obviously but after a certain number of years I started to give up on expecting people to respond to emails.) For a while ILX filled that void for me but less & less so as posting styles (incl my own) gradually changed in the smartphone/twitter era. I really miss getting an email from a good friend and reading about whatever's going on in their life in complete sentences written in their own voice. Nothing has really replaced it for me, I really feel the absence of it in my life and it still bums me out.

i just don't like when in a non-related topic people on one platform complain about people/discussion on another platform. don't cross the streams.

xp I feel you

though on the other hand as a semi-pro email reader/writer, well...

I have come to the (too late) realisation that not only is creating original / valuable work irrelevant to virality on social media, it is actually a handicap.

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)

― j., Tuesday, 19 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Also plenty of those micro- communitues go on to form outside of twitter via WhatsApp groups to actual meet ups.

Plenty of people have made friendships or got married out of it too.

Besides all that I see ilx style discussions to events of the day all the time. With people who seem not to have met and just share an interest.

no way. dumb as a rock, poor emotional regulation

Instagram - pretty pictures, bands, architecture, friends’ kids. I find it quite nice.

Twitter - occasionally funny, I never tweet and only follow a half dozen people I actually know. It’s a cesspool overall but limited exposure is fine.

The key is to lightly consume and not be an active part of the ecosystem.

Facebook is also bearable if you eliminate everyone you don’t have a strong personal connection to and just make dick jokes with each other.

xp -- the problem with substantive discussions via email is writing the email, it's all the procrastination of writing for work plus an added vector of guilt because now it's personal

Something gained, something lost: in the early days of e-mail, it was a smooth transition from letter-writing for me, so I wrote long, thoughtful e-mails to whichever American friends I'd been writing letters to and who now had e-mail. Now I mostly FB message, and whatever e-mails I send are very short. 1000 times easier, 1000 times more superficial.

ikr

ok Twitter is good now! j, I followed your suggestions and followed a Fields medalist who is active on there, and today he made an announcement relevant to my interests & I tweeted back an invitation to further dialogue (in irl), and then they tweeted back with interest!

La Lechera posted something last year that nicely captures some key differences between ILX and social media.

I'd like to say something nice that is more generally about ILX:
When I get the urge to engage in conversation (specifically online in lieu of an IRL option), I strongly prefer to have a conversational group of people who might care about what I have to say. The way ILX is structured, I can choose to share my thoughts/questions (at any time of day or night!) about a specific topic with other people interested in that topic who ostensibly read/ post on the thread because they also have an interest in the topic. Then I potentially (ideally) avoid 1) annoying/inciting the "rage" of other people by yammering to people who don't care and 2) can learn from others interested in the topic 3) post in several different threads without feeling like I am yammering in a manner coherent to myself alone, as I would if I were to share my thoughts on twitter, for example.

There's no Me Feed here unless someone specifically searches for posts by a specific user (right?). I realize that hashtags function in this way for some people, but I like the general environment of ILX because I am free from my own image, free from my public-facing identity, and yet also hopefully at least somewhat known to people on account of having been here for a while (since 2005?!) and having met/enjoyed quality hangs with a number of you irl (and online!)

So thanks ILX, you have weathered the social media storm and come out ahead in a number of ways. You are not perfect and you have had many bouts of being unwell as a space for my preferred variety of nonconfrontational conversation, you are still here and have the above-mentioned attributes to your favor. This post is not about me; it is about appreciating the longevity and specificity of our old pal. ILX. *toast*

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Thursday, August 1, 2019 4:03 PM (nine months ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I feel that post a lot. early in my professional life a senior member of my field told me that I was quiet in an irl setting where it would have been better to be vocal, and he was right, because I get shy when there are a medium number of people watching (I'm comfortable talking to small and large groups, by contrast). I had to "get over it" because professional advancement made it necessary and I'm now ok at it. I still wonder if it's just some natural shyness, or something about my ethnic upbringing, as a Latino; and whether my profession reinforces the...forthrightness of other ethnic groups without recognizing other ethnic dispositions. Maybe this is also true of social media.

not "forthrightness", more, "forwardness", I think.

i think there's a lot of space made in philosophy for people who want to hold the floor for various reasons (many notably not good). even the ones who don't want that as speakers are disposed to encourage it by the ways they are receptive to it as listeners and respondents.

yeah it can be rotten. I think I like settings where everyone is encouraged to have their turn, rather than letting the big mouths hog things. I just wonder about the gender & ethnic dimensions of being a big mouth or of being someone who wants to give space to others (I am of the latter kind). Though sometimes I feel like I have something actually worth saying, and I guess the big mouths must feel like that all the time? I just make sure not to sit next to them at dinners.

La lechera otm, hate social media. I used to post on ilx way too much and now it seems comparatively incredibly benign. Also can be sure nothing is going to 'go viral' and so the show off element and careering that exists on Twitter say is not a thing here. There's also the archival element, you can return to theads or use them as resources (I recently read all the threads about the red Crayola while really stuck on 'introduction'

Feeling these posts from jaymc’s on down

I'll be honest: I've had more scraps on ILX than on Facebook, in about the same time-frame. Nothing too major, else I'd be long gone, but there have been more than a few exchanges over the years that upset me, something that hardly ever happens with me on Facebook. I imagine that has to do with the combination of the way I approach the two and the fact your Facebook world is much easier to control.

la lechera post is SO otm

I think I've had two scraps on Facebook in 10 years. One with a former friend I blocked, one with my sister-in-law who blocked me, but has unblocked me since. I haven't got into that many scraps on ILX in the same time period, but it's certainly been more than two!

You can look at the amount of control you have two different ways. As LL says, you can pick which threads you read or post on with ILX. But that only goes so far. Whatever scraps I've gotten into have been, presumably, "with other people interested in that topic who ostensibly read/post on the thread because they also have an interest in the topic." But that doesn't really spare you from confrontation--it facilitates it, if--the part of ILX I've never understood--someone's lying in wait to make a big deal out of the fact you don't see this common interest (a film, a baseball player, whatever) the same way. The control on Facebook is in who's on your friends list and what feeds you let onto your wall. Which, to me, feels like much more control.

This thread making me thinking about a lot of things, not sure how much I can post now, probably not too much, but for the most part, with some expected exceptions of course, FB posting seems to me so generic, so disposable, so preaching-to-the-converted, so me me me me me, etc.. Here we have a ghost of chance that we are having some kind of interesting conversation. Also you post something interesting on FB, maybe at best you will get a few likes (I have kept my number of friends amazingly low over the past decade) Post something interesting here and there is a much better chance someone will respond in kind. Even if no one responds you may find it again yourself years later and get something out of it, it doesn't have that same sense of sitting there Unliked or Uncared for.

I mean, the problem -- which is also a problem with twitter, but maybe not a social media-specific problem -- is that there are designated Bad People, which are sometimes designated due to good reasons, or reasons that are knowable and avoidable, but not always. and once someone is a designated Bad Person then anything else they post is deemed bad; and furthermore, once someone is designated as a Bad Person, everybody else is compelled to share that opinion, or else they too will become a designated Bad Person