Are You Cut Out for Social Media?

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