Category: Technology

Social meditations

So if anyone’s paying attention, I’ve been giving Twitter the heave-ho (I never acknowledged X) and I’ve moved the Groceteria account over to Bluesky. There’s not really an Otherstream presence there because let’s face it, there’s not really much of an Otherstream anymore.

I’ve always had a weird relationship with social media. After largely avoiding it in the 2000s, I jumped in more heavily during the 2010s with Facebook and later Twitter. I never warmed to Instagram at all, and TikTok was never a thing I contemplated even for a second. I use YouTube and flickr, but for their original purposes and not for any “social” aspects–and mostly as a consumer rather than a creator.

Then came COVID (which has been the start of so many paragraphs for so many people).

At some point during the pandemic, Facebook in particular stopped being a thing I enjoyed. It just wasn’t fun anymore and it almost seemed more like work. A lot of it was politics and pandemic stress. Surprisingly, my biggest issue was not people I disagreed but “friends” (using the social media definition of that term) with whom I was pretty much in sync. Eventually the memes, the clickbait, and the 24-7 outrage became too exhausting to slog through on a daily basis, even if most of it was aligned with my own end of the political spectrum. I had a lot of friends who posted nothing but this stuff, maybe because they (understandably) weren’t leaving the house much. But I was not willing to devote that much of my life to perpetual anger and to following other people’s online arguments with strangers.

Basically it got to the point where these posts were not increasing my knowledge. They were only increasing my anxiety level. Yes, I know everything sucks. No, I don’t need hourly reminders and repetitions of why and how it all sucks, and I refuse to spend 24 hours a day thinking about it. My mental health is more important to me than demonstrating an appropriate level of outrage by liking a meme or a reposted article.

So I swore off Facebook almost five years ago and haven’t really looked back. I feel bad because I’ve lost touch with a lot of people, but I still don’t think I can wander back into that community. And when I’ve peeked over the years (I still have to keep an account open for work) I see that a lot of my friends are also MIA at this point.

Twitter was a little different. It was never really a social thing for me, but more of a reading list and a way to promote the sites (more about Groceteria than Otherstream). It was not a place where I generally interacted or got into arguments. I actually felt I had a lot more control over the types of content on Twitter. It was good. Until it wasn’t anymore. It’s no secret how things went downhill REALLY FUCKING FAST when the Muskrat took over. Users abandoned the platform in droves and engagement went down to almost nothing. And a lot of the content I wanted to see was no longer there either. And it got infinitely worse over the past few months as said Muskrat revealed himself to be the full-on Nazi-channeling nutjob we all knew he could be.

So I’m out, partly as a statement (that no one but me really cares about) but also because Twitter just wasn’t fun anymore. Will the skies be bluer somewhere else? Who knows.

As I get older, I’m recognizing that maybe I’m way too much of an introvert. Maybe I’ll try interacting in person again. It used to work sometimes.

Socially mediated

I’m an introvert. Hardcore. I play the game well and a lot my coworkers in particular might not even recognize it, but I’m not especially “social” and I generally am quite happy with my own company most of the time. This has a lot to do with my being an only child and probably has even more to do with the fact that I had very few friends in general until I got to college and have always felt very socially awkward. I never really absorbed that whole social interaction thing correctly, though I have gotten really good at “faking it” particularly though my long past working in retail and my current career, which involves a lot of collaboration, interaction, and public speaking.

I’ve been communicating online (often as my primary medium) for more than twenty-five years. In the late 1990s, back when this site was really popular, I carried on regular email correspondence with many, many people in many, many places. Seriously, there were few places in the U.S. I could go where I didn’t know someone within on or two area codes. Even then, though, it was all asynchronous. I was not hanging out in AOL chatrooms or message boards or IRC (except maybe to download pirated software or porn on the latter). It was all sort of “old school”: email using complete sentences, etc.

Things changed a bit when I got partnered. Frankly, I neglected a lot of friendships because I really only had so much “social” in me and I felt like I should probably be giving most of that to my partner. That’s not an unusual or bad choice but in retrospect, I do have some regrets about it. Between neglect and the fact that the website because less and less of a medium because people weren’t really interacting that way so much anymore, I found that I had a much smaller social circle ten years later when I found myself single again.

I tiptoed into social media while in grad school and eventually got pretty active on Facebook as a way of keeping up with friends, which was nice for quite a while. I also did Twitter, but that was always more about using it as a reading list and a place to promote content on the other site. I generally avoided much engagement in general on Twitter and didn’t really join in on arguments and heated discussions very often on any platform.

Mid-pandemic, in the summer of 2020, I suddenly swore off Facebook. There was some specific interaction that pushed me in that direction (oddly enough, I don’t remember exactly what it was) but it was something I had been thinking about for a long time. I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore; it started feeling like work. I liked the aspect of keeping up with friends, but so many of my friends were no longer posting anything personal to begin with. It was all either politics or memes about how awful everything was. And I already knew how awful everything was. I didn’t need to spend time doom scrolling my friends’ posts to realize that. About the same time, I swore off news sites for a good while too, and was basically only watching The National on CBC every night because it was less awful. I tried to unfollow or mute the friends who were the worst “offenders” but after a while I just hated logging on, so I stopped. And I sort of regret that too because I lost touch with a lot of people I really like. But I couldn’t do it anymore.

I stuck with Twitter, oddly enough, just because I could tailor it to my needs and curate what I read. And it was great for a few years. But then, as the Muskrat took over, that functionality went away, and with it went most of the small group of people I interacted with there. Twitter basically just blew up one day and was never quite the same. I stuck around for a year, not posting as much and not spending as much time there. There were still things I followed regularly (most of them related to history, architecture, and urbanism) but increasingly people who used to post interesting material were abandoning ship as Twitter became more and more of a sewer.

I should have joined the exodus last year. I didn’t. I’m doing it now. And I’m not sure which platform comes next, if any. I have an account on Mastodon, but I mainly repost things from Twitter and Flicker there to an audience that’s a fraction of what I had on Twitter and I don’t otherwise engage. Threads does not impress me and Instagram never did, so a return the Land of Meta is not in the horizon. I do Flickr sometimes, but that was always more about sharing photos (and hosting them for the site) than about socializing. And BlueSky? Who knows? Maybe I’ll just start getting better about adding content here again and conversing by email. Probably not.

The social aspect is hard. I’ve sworn off most social media, I hate talking on the phone, and no one corresponds by email anymore except for work. What’s left?

All of this is not to suggest that I don’t have friends whose company I enjoy and with whom I still interact regularly (in person, even). But I’m increasingly worried that my isolation may be growing, particularly since many of my closest friends live nowhere near me. I think this is a pretty common worry for us introverts and other “non-joiners” for whom online communication worked well until it didn’t.