I've been having social media related thoughtsI've been a little fixated on building out my little
Neocities page recently. It's been fun to make a pretty pink mess and test out tags and scraps of HTML I used to know better. It's fun to decorate and fuss with. It's proving a lot more satisfying than social media, even though there is no social aspect to it. It's a piece of web just for me and the few people that may see it. It doesn't have much of a theme, just stuff that I like, books I am reading or am about to read, poetry, videos I enjoy, and so forth. A mishmosh. A commonplace book. It'd be nice to follow more people on there and actually communicate. Maybe that wil come in time.
Anyway, it's my latest response to a years-long, slow-moving avoidance of social media. I have multiple accounts across the usual platforms, but I don't use them with any regularity. The rot really set in after grad school - I had enjoyed posting on FB, reading others' posts, playing with the platform the way we once did. But when I graduated, it was very hard to find a job, and I felt like an utter failure. At the time, I was too emotionally invested to see that there were so many factors that depressed me and what I thought may have been the start of an academic career. But that's not the point here. The point is I can recall sitting at the kitchen table, tearfully unfollowing people who seemed to be waltzing right into plum positions, publishing, and generally living what I wanted to. Jealousy - of course. But more self-isolation and shame. I just stopped using FB with any regularity.
As I recovered, I started to realize that I was less ashamed to be "in public" as a "failure", I was getting bored on social media. FB just didn't have the fun it once did. Twitter was starting to loose its shine. IG (I only got in after FB brought it) didn't demand much effort but soon got boring as well. Eventually Tumblr became too much bother for too little reward. Why was it boring? These sites (except maybe Tumblr) were designed to be as captivating as possible.
I had become tired of no talk. No discourse. No exchange. Just likes. Hearts, thumbs-up, etc. Approving or disapproving a piece of content made one feel like one was interacting with someone else, but it was really just with the site itself. Social media had started to indulge in the cardinal sin of being boring. And I became lonely. Surrounded by people...no, profiles....and no sense of connecting with others.
Eventually, I had downloaded Tiktok to see what the fuss was over and boy howdy I was I unprepared for the firehose. I remember when social media was something you could curate, something you could modify. These endless-scroll streams of content didn't even leave visual room for signs of life. This was channel surfing, but more interesting. Just interesting enough to keep you in, but not enough to hold you even for 30 seconds.
Now I had a new problem on my hands. Over the years, boredom gave way to novelty with TikTok-like streams becoming part of IG and YT. This became a little unnerving. I indulged, and still do. But it's so easy to just hook up to the dopamine machine and swipe away for hours. I can even fall asleep scrolling - the voices are soothing. This is worrisome.
Empty CaloriesThe latest iteration of social media, which is anything but social, is a problem that preoccupies me. I've been consuming it way more than I would like to
but it's also "the only place where people are". I never did solve my original problem of loneliness, but a couple hours' trip down the stream sure does quiet my brain. I get to see dozens of faces, voices, lives. I follow certain comics, enjoying micro-series. I follow gardeners, potters, dominatrices, poets, dressmakers. I don't think there's anything wrong with this per se, but it's basically empty calories - no one really talks or interacts.
I can and do follow multiple streams from the same people so I can enjoy their work without being on the dopamine machine. I've discovered artists and makers that I would have never even heard of. That has to be a good thing. But the problem remains. Empty calories. When you have empty calories, you keep eating and eating, searching for satiation, but it can't occur. I keep scrolling and scrolling for satiation, but it can't occur here.
There seems to be no real way of actually connecting with anyone, even my own friends. I do stuff I'd like to share. I have interests I'd like to share. I'd love to connect and strengthen friendship and make new. I'm here and I'm fun! I'd actually like to be participating. I'd love to be streaming or podcasting. I know how to do this and with some time I could do it well. It's true I barely have the time, but I could make it. But how do you get this to people? Social Media. As I said, all you get there is a sea of likes or upvotes and end up feeding some techbro's latest project or putting yourself in the sights of some whack-a-loon.
Chilling effectsThis leads me to a related thought: the dangers of putting yourself out there. What I'm about to type here feels like a cop-out but there's something to it. The way the social internet has evolved has made it dangerous. It's so easy for people to react on a split-second, to fall deeper into ideological divides. Actually, it's not even ideological anymore, ideology has become branding. People divide on brands, tags, surface-level categories. People love the familiar and love to align themselves with others like them. I've done it. You've done it. It's natural. But when combined with untrammeled "free" speech and the ever-changing whims of advertisers and tech companies, as well as the firehose of information...it becomes actually frightening.
Say the wrong thing, like the wrong thing and people start making callout posts. Actually a callout post is quaint! At least that kind of stays in one area. Today there are far, far too many ways for people to find personal information of others. Think doxxing, harassment, swatting, and so on. People can and will take the time to hunt down you, your loved ones, your job, and damage that web of connection as well as try to ensure that whatever "sin" you have committed will be linked to your real name. This is not fringe behavior - the news has examples of certain musty billionaires allowing this to happen in their names. People can now leverage tech to not only fuck up your world now, but also fuck it up in perpetuity, since part of getting into schools, jobs, and even dating will often involve at the very least a few google searches. I'm not nearly interesting or active enough for this to happen, but the fact that it could just rattles me.
Then we have the problem of "ayy-eye", as the Tiktok kids may say. Even as I'd like to be making stuff (not content. I refuse to call it content any more than I have to) I'm not all that keen on continuiously feeding the data machine my face and voice. We have unimaginably sophisticated tech that allows face and voice spoofing. Your speech patterns, intonations, face, facial expressions, and so on are all fair game. I'm sure my data stream from My Space on up is in the innards of some ayy-eye thing out there. I just hope my selfies and pics of plants and housepets aren't going to too nefarious a use.
I don't dream of laborSocial media life is an entire ass full time unpaid job. Some of my friends are able to do this in service of their careers and they do great jobs. I love their work and I'm stoked to see them advertising, making money, and making their dream real. But my god it's a lot of work. I suppose if you have a reason (eg you published a book, invented a widget, teach a course, etc) it makes sense. Personally, I don't have an overarching vision. That's more of a me-problem, true. But I don't see the benefit of deliberate use of social media unless you have a business model. For me, personally, most of my waking life is made of business. I'm literally a middle manager. No, I did not try to be there, but it's my mundane life and it's not so bad. However, I need time and space where I am not thinking and acting like that. I can't make a product of myself, coming home from work to work at social. I've tried. Doesn't work. I support my friends that can and do, but I can't. Personally, it does feel like one needs a social-sona to be able to participate. I already split my emotions enough ways dealing with work and the background radiation of a chaotic world.
Scene and be seenSomething else that's giving me pause about social spaced on our current internet is the fact that I'm suspicious AF about large communities and scenes. I grew up involved in a particularly large and well-known SciFi group. It was basically extended family and I kind of miss that. However, after a particularly traumatic experience, I lost the connection I once had. Attempts to reconnect ended up with unsavory results rather than a sense of community: leftover drama, emotional vampirism, and sexual creepiness I think I was too dumb to see as a teenager. These stood out in fucking neon signs to me as a grown woman. It was disappointing. I had had so many fun times, learned so much, was shaped so much, but revisiting that community felt like a collapsing souffle. Maybe it was me having grown up. Maybe it was changes in the community. Maybe it was both. I let those connections fade. I do miss it, though. I think I had turned to social media to fill that void and nope...no-go.
On a related note, I've been listening to the audio version of
Drawing Down the Moon, essentially a history book for 20th century Neo-pagan movements. I feel a weird mix of nostalgia and jealousy listening to Adler's words. All the cool shit has been extinct for like 20-30 years! This is a known problem in Paganism....it's decentralized, communities, events, etc. are basically labors of love, and eventually the leaders die out and communities with them. And we reinvent the wheel. Usually on my morning commute, I listen to Adler's descriptions of large events, community rituals, festivals and oh, boy. Are they still there?Did they survive? What does Pagan community mean post 9-11? What does that mean post/mid-COVID? What does that mean intra-recession? Did I miss a golden age? Where can I go be "weird"? Where do I get to howl at the moon? Is it all just witchtok now? I like being solitary but even I have limits. Also - was there ever community? Can there be? If all we have now is social media, especially social media as it is presently - can we even form community? Are we all just doomed to liking each other's posts and wishing we all had that cottage in the forest together? Can we survive forever on witchtok and Pinterest boards?
Drawing Down the Moonwas republished a few times as the author updated. She didn't end up writing much about online communities before she passed (at least not in successive editions of DDtM). In the edition I have, there's mention of websites, but not social media, really. I think the author passed in 2014 or so, so she probably didn't get much of that world into the book. Others have picked up the torch, I presume. I hope. Hearing about these now-old movements, discourses, magazines, and so on produces such an odd feeling in me. Social media just can't compare with a printed journal or even a good meaty list-serv.
I hope I haven't mapped too much of my own issues onto this, but I suspect I'm not alone. At the end, I'm still worried, and not just for myself. I don't think we can afford to become more alienated and atomized. I don't think we're going to loose Paganism any more than I think we'll loose nerd culture, handcrafts, etc. etc. but I think the more we mediate through corporatized and commercially optimized tools, we're going to loose a lot before we make any progress. That worries me. With the state of the world as it is now, we need to form actual community. We need networks of nerds. We need different kinds of spaces for different communities. We need to have actual human contact, even if it's through a computer. The tech is not the problem, the business is.
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