Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

*Many of the types of stories that are making national news today would have been regional news only, and some regional stories wouldn't have been stories decades ago

i thought that was a good post neanderthal.

this article is relevant to this discussion, but i didn't vet the author's parents who may or may not be involved in crimes so use your best judgement:

https://www.bookforum.com/print/2702/the-self-conscious-drama-of-morality-in-contemporary-fiction-24022

uuugh lauren oyler is just a bad writer

i'm a bad person, that's why i posted it

you're not! she just has bad ideas and conveys them poorly

i was joking but ty.

maybe so, i've never heard of her, but the article is mostly a series of relevant observations on contemporary lit

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-to-disguise-his-horns

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes in volume five of his series of autofictional novels My Struggle, in a representative passage. “I had to stop being a coward, stop being evasive and vague, I had to be honest, upright, clear, sincere.” In the next volume his best friend, Geir, jokingly calls him “a bad person . . . one of the few true narcissists” while discussing the uncle Karl Ove has angered by writing his books.

NOW WAIT A MOMENT

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels are an exception that proves the rule: Praised for their portrayal of “unlikable” women, a feminist and therefore moral project, they’re often narrated by a person who seems to be taunting the reader with her awareness of her own badness.

i'm not a huge moshfegh fan but surely there is more going on than this

The shift to socially conscious art and criticism Molly Fischer termed “the Great Awokening” has meant most books are judged on everything except aesthetic terms

citation needed

i could go on but i won't

I think both the Aeon article and the Oyler article are pretty weak btw

(xp: ye, the second sentence BradNelson quoted is the one that jumped out at me from the Oyler -- this is an assertion people reflexively emit again and again but it just.... doesn't seem to have any relation to the way I actually see books out in the world being judged, praised, sold)

i just think any discussion of a topic like that of our ilx's katherine will need the distinction between morality and moralizing at some point.

The distinction is real, and neither of these two articles do a good job of making it (only the second really tries)

And though she occasionally makes mistakes—cheats on her boyfriend, offends her friends after drinking too much, doesn’t call her mom very often—she admits them.

what is a good person? someone who has the correct politics on social media even if their offline actions include infidelity, indulgence to the pt of cruelty and alienation from their family.

I mean, that's what the article wants you to think some unspecified cabal of people in charge of our culture insists, yes.

But that is not a stance you will find in either of those Lerner novels, the Jenny Offill book, or How Should A Person Be?.

i don't think the author wants you to think the person in the first paragraph is a secret bad person - they probably think the composite is reasonable for the social mores of the day (at least of a certain set)

it’s hard to tell one way or the other bc it’s not well-written

Yes, looking at it again, I feel like there is just something fundamentally disorganized in Oyler's writing. It's not clear to me what she means to say about e.g. Sheila Heti. I felt the same about her review of Tolentino's book -- each paragraph read like something that was saying something but I could never actually get it to cohere into something but a sensation of complaint.

I do think that when a clear assertion emerges it is, like "The shift to socially conscious art and criticism Molly Fischer termed “the Great Awokening” has meant most books are judged on everything except aesthetic terms," incompatible with my experience.

She's probably a good person though

The fact that I'm spending my time engaging with this is presumably a sign I'm cut out for social media

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

the aeon one is almost unreadable

The fact that I'm spending my time engaging with this is presumably a sign I'm cut out for social media

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, May 27, 2020 8:33 AM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

is it weird that i think the same fact about me means i'm not cut out for social media at all

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

― silby, Wednesday, May 27, 2020 11:36 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

was waiting for this post

you're both right! that's the paradox of being cut out for social media xp

what if... social media is cut out for us

I think the Aeon one is trying to say that 'virtue signalling is bad not good' (if anyone needed a tl;dr, there it is).

my stance against reading articles continues to pay dividends

― silby, Wednesday, May 27, 2020 11:36 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

was waiting for this post

― karl...arlk...rlka...lkar..., Wednesday, May 27, 2020 8:41 AM (five minutes ago)

:*

what i got out of the laura oyster article is here are some examples of how authors' novels were shaped in various ways by the depiction of anxiety about being a "good person" which is triangulated according to an acute self-awareness that their morality will be judged widely and visibly by their audience on social media

this is actually a perfect example but not for the reasons claimed it is; after reading the article my basic stance was "this was a decent article, I'm glad I read it, I should look up some of those other books," but now I am questioning that stance because it does not seem to be aligned with the correct one, nor do I trust that I'm right

What do you think?

I don't fucking know because what I think is apparently the wrong thing

yr ego balloon needs inflating!

I don't think "how should a person be" (apparently discussed in the article I won't read) is written in the context of social media scrutiny at all!

katherine I definitely recommend all the Ben Lerner novels and both Jenny Offill novels and How Should A Person Be? because they are all funny and good. Probably Motherhood is good too, it's on my shelf and I just haven't gotten to it yet. I think the things this article is concerned about are most present in The Topeka School, which, perhaps not by coincidence, is the least successful of Lerner's books, I would start with 10:04 (or, better, How Should A Person Be?, which is just wonderfully and radically its own thing, and when you are trapped in a social-media-mediated self-consciousness spiral the best prescription is a radically alternate perspective)

Motherhood is really good too! It's sort of secretly about the Holocaust though.

Leaving the Atocha Station is no less apposite to this discussion and very much worth everyone's time as well.

I've read most of those except the ben lerner

Oh sorry for wrongly imagining otherwise!

If you've read all those books and thought the Oyler was on point maybe it's me who's missing it!

glad some ppl think it's funny to ask if Ammonium Nitrate would be a great metal band name the day after Beirut.

was unusually dickish to this person cos it was in poor taste

I hate when you notice you have less mutual friends than before with someone because it means nearly always someone has removed you and even though you know logically that it doesn't mean anything, it still stings your ego a bit. I like to think that I'm not so unlikable that my mere online presence (which can be muted) is so unpleasant. OTOH these days I only seem to share pro-feminism and pro-trans rights articles I've enjoyed reading, so maybe it's for the best these people remove themselves from my social media circles

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-19/onlyfans-to-block-sexually-explicit-videos-starting-in-october

if i were smarter and knew how to program, launching an onlyfans knockoff that is JUST explicit video seems like a goldmine

"We have decided that our role in distributing sexually explicit videos is morally and ethically wrong and something we want no further part in. That is why we are only going to engage in this harmful and exploitative activity for another, oh, let's say 45 days, so we can all get comfortable with the idea. We don't want to be rash."

I'll admit to being out of the loop but...isn't OnlyFans basically just OnlyExplicitVideos?

yes

this isn't related to the link forksclovetofu posted, but how does everyone "keep up" with social media?

am i getting old or not using it right?

i try to read local and world news every day. it sometimes takes me up to two hours and i still feel like i only skimmed through a lot of articles. i may have too many interests, though?

i would say i'm not cut out for social media because it seems like an endless stream of information. add that you have to learn how to parse people's meaning according to whatever character they're playing or their personality, and things just become so complicated.

i only use facebook but don't have any personal details or pictures up. it's mostly to keep in touch with friends, because we don't all live in the same city anymore. i have less than 20 friends on there.

and just when Rachel Dolezal set up her account no less