Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

idk I still get quite a lot of engagement and conversation on FB, even X. I know my life would be poorer without the friends and acquaintances on them.

Quitting sm for a day led me to speak to people irl
Now I’m trying to combine sm with real life

For me, there is a category of person for whom Facebook (or whatever) is _exactly_ the right amount of contact. It's my stepsister's husband or my ninth ex-girlfriend or the person I was in a band with that one time.

I do enjoy and treasure those connections, but I want to calibrate my closeness very carefully. Do I want to lose them forever, and completely forget our shared history? No. But do I want to invite them over for Thanksgiving, and have them stay in my guest room? Fuck no.

If you are careful about curating friends and feeds and keeping appropriate boundaries, social media can be a good tool.

Tl Dr there are some people in my life where social media allows me to stay exactly the right distance from a lot of people

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person? This friend is always proposing irl meetups but I just don’t have the appetite until I get to know them better

No.

Thanks YMP

it's not "weird" but if you want to get to know them better i would meet in person. IME even if most of the interactions you'll have are going to be online, spending a small amount of time together in person will give your online interactions some important context you are missing otherwise. it's necessary to understanding who they are.

anyway i am not cut out for social media because i'm susceptible to that co-option of my thinking space and attention. i broke my scrolling addiction when i deleted my socials several years ago, but it's become a problem again since i got my first smartphone in late 2020. i could stare at the ceiling all day without getting bored, mobile internet is a danger and i need to go back to using a dumb phone.

I think my hesitation has to do more with the fact that I just don’t want to get to know this person better. Ugh

yeah, that's what i was hoping to clarify.

i think dial up aol with chatrooms and instant messenger and usenet all tethered to a desktop was the right amount of internet for me.

ty dm!

Why wouldn't it?

Fair question. I think being "good at social media" is related to but not identical with a certain kind of .. I don't know, is glibness the word? I am also good, in real life, at coming up with a succinct turn of phrase, and I think I habitually use this to sound as if I know more about something than I do, or have thought more deeply about something than I have. It's a bad habit in real life and on social media it's very explicitly rewarded. So I think of this particular skill I have as something that it would be better for me to resist deploying or further developing.

well put

I think I have the opposite problem. I can follow what is happening from loads of different sources and get a reasonable grasp on events and then sound like a clueless numpt when I post about it .. lol it can always be be worse.

Stance on this has hardened a bit since this thread was posted. Quite important to have more sources than ever as things develop in places we know little about.

Sometimes we can do something with this information at the moment -- such as marching -- sometimes there is little.

More locally I only see things getting worse and degraded. In Europe I see much of the public become more divided and more with right wing (or worse) parties elected to power in response to Western made catastrophes like climate change. This week: Dutch elections, riots in Dublin.

So I just think it could become an issue of safety as well, and/or not despairing as very good people are speaking out on issues.

In current concern-trolling news, apparently there are people worried about how social-media-driven cultural polarization means that young people won't get married.

https://wapo.st/46wP02g (non-paywall gift link)

The argument here (I guess) is that social media is helping to sort people into political camps. And they will not marry each other.

Which it does, of course, but that is not necessarily a bad thing (like, why would I want to marry someone who hates me and hates what I believe in?)

This sounds like a digital follow-on of the "big sort" where people physically moved to be near people who agree with them on stuff.

One of my controversial opinions is that polarization can be useful. There are people I do not wish to compromise with.

Quitting sm for a day led me to speak to people irl
Now I’m trying to combine sm with real life

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person? This friend is always proposing irl meetups but I just don’t have the appetite until I get to know them better

― calstars

do you know how long it took me to figure out that by "sm" you meant "social media"?

fet sucks, go to a munch

Pet peeve: I hate it when scolds say that being on your phone isn't being with people.

Songs? Made by people. Movies and TV shows? People. Games? Concieved and made by people. Books? Written by 0eople. Social media? People. Discord, Slack, Instagram? People.

ILX? People.

When you look at a screen, most of the time it is a way of experiencing... people.

People
People who need people
Are the luckiest people in the world

Pet peeve: I hate it when scolds say that being on your phone isn't being with people.

Songs? Made by people. Movies and TV shows? People. Games? Concieved and made by people. Books? Written by 0eople. Social media? People. Discord, Slack, Instagram? People.

ILX? People.

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

Soylent Green? People.

ok serious post i think

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 find that my emotional boundaries are healthier in person than they were on the internet.

i get a lot out of interpersonal interaction that i don't get on from the internet. the internet is great for talking about things intellectually. it just doesn't meet my social needs, though. i found this to be... particularly challenging during covid, when my in-person ability to socialize was curtailed severely.

i have a lot of friends that aren't local, and i keep up with them through the internet. a lot of times i want to express myself in writing, and the internet is good for that. my level of engagement with the public internet is _minimal_, though. this is the only place i post to on the public internet. i like the people, of course, but also, this place has healthy boundaries and isn't overwhelming in scale.

maybe i could get a gram and make it friends-only. maybe i'll do that at some point. that seems to be the way everybody i know does it. honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

Is it weird to want to get to know someone on sm before you meet them in person?

I have at least two friendships that are pretty solid where I met the person on social media, live within ten miles of them, and still have yet to meet them in real life. one of them that's lasted about 10 years.

as far as why we haven't met up, just hasn't happened.

ever since I was 11 and started emailing some random dude from a newsgroup about model rockets (who I assumed was also 11 like me) I wondered about this very thing. like how cool would it be to make an actual friend from the internet. I did randomly meet a person from ILX once and it was pretty weird. not because of the person in question (he was very chill and easy to talk to) but because they potentially could know you better than your IRL friends in a lot of ways. I reveal a lot of stuff on here that I just never talk about IRL. not because it's private or embarrassing but because I don't think anyone else really gives a fuck. in fact it's not until recently that I realized I had never said the word "Autechre" out loud before.

long story, but pretty much my whole life is the way it is because of a good friendship with a guy I met from IRC in the 90s.

honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

tale as old as time

honestly not having a gram is negatively impacting my dating life.

tale as old as time

― bae (sic)

one of the best things about social media is people being able to pick up on my puns :)

I realized I had never said the word "Autechre" out loud before.

how did you say it? this happened with a friend the other day. he said "...uh...autech-ruh" and then soon afterward, when i was speaking, i said "autekker"

then we had that magical eye contact moment which says "we have chosen different paths of pronunciation here"

I said it the way you did. but then quickly realized "hmmm that's probably not right". and then had a little anxious moment where I realized I had no idea how to actually like, talk about their music

I used to write for an online zine called Satan Stole My Teddybear (it's long gone now) and posted on their message boards beginning at age 18, moving over to a new, independent message board when SSMT closed theirs, and now the remnants of us are on a third independent message board.

I met one of the members of the board in 2015 at a Rush concert, and then one in Las Vegas in 2019. it was kind of incredible each time, we'd both been part of an online community for half of our lives from a distance...boom, they're here, in the flesh!

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 :(