The False Deepening
Following up on my last post about one of pitfalls of social media (The Great Shallowing), which came about after reading this excellent article in the Guardian about how our brains are being hacked.
At the risk of being overly Meta, I just spent five minutes looking for the Guardian article online, which lead me down a rabbit hole of checking out a few twitter profiles, sending out a new tweet to promote my own work, and almost sent me to Facebook, since I'd posted it there a week back. It was at that point that I said fuck it, and we're back. Five minutes sacrificed to the gods of social media is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
So in The Great Shallowing I lamented in very broad strokes about how social media is making us all (your humble narrator included) into slack-jawed jerks with the attention spans of fruit-flies and a massive network of acquaintances who we know not as people but as a collection of social media algorithms. And then I suggested that we write more real letters (or at least emails) to people we want to stay in touch instead of communicating through chat boxes. So: Identify problem, offer solution. Caught up? Good?
(But I am going to digress to share something for a moment. Yesterday my Girlfriend was poking around the settings section of Twitter, and came across something under the settings tab that led to a treasure trove of DATA that Twitter had gleaned from her account activity, all in all about a hundred different descriptors, some of which were correct ("female aged 35-45"), others out of date but true once upon a time ("dog owner") and still others hilariously incorrect ("annual income: $250,000") - there was a shit-ton of other minutiae in there, and on mine as well. Twitter allows you to delete it, which we both did. Will keep you posted if this leads to a radically different Twitter experience.)
Back to the now, and one of the likely many corollaries to The Great Shallowing brought about by social media (and here I should probably put for those who easily take umbrage that the opinions expressed in my blog are my own, but if you are indeed taking umbrage do leave a comment below and I will do my best to defend my thinking as long as you're decent about it), The False Deepening.
By this I mean the trend fostered by social media to presume intimacy that has been neither created organically nor requested.
Over the last year or so as my social media community has expanded, I've noticed an increasing number of people in my feed who regularly use the platform to share publicly deeply personal information. One person posted a lengthy essay about their battle with sex addiction. Another, their trials and tribulations with adjusting to life in the country to which they'd expatriated, down to bad dating experiences, deep feelings of culture shock and bouts of sexual frustration.
There are just a couple of examples, and if I'm being a bit vague it's because I don't want to deliberately call anyone out personally (hence the gender neutral pronouns).
Don't get me wrong. My friend Stella posts about everything from sex and personal dating experiences to fisting dos and don'ts and on which date is it appropriate to ask your partner for a golden shower. But Stella is literally a professional sex educator, who travels the country talking about this stuff and writes columns regularly about sex, kink, polyamory and so forth. So when I see on her feed something like
I don't find it off-putting because a) that's what I expect to see in the Facebook feed of someone who's also a sex educator, and b) Stella is someone I personally know rather than a random FB acquaintance.
Seeing similar stuff popping up with alarming regularity in the feeds of random acquaintances is weirdly off-putting. So my solution (because Snarky Tofu is all about solutions) has been to start gently unfollowing people I don't really know who continually post way too much personal information.
An even more off-putting manifestation of this False Deepening I've experienced recently has come in the form of lengthy ... can we call them emails if they come through Facebook chats ... from people who I've never personally met (but know of through other friends), written with way too much familiarity given the online acquaintance nature of our knowing each other. This morning I got five hundred words of text about an unusual dating experience, beginning with the words
"Making a good impression on the ladies of Taiwan isn't as easy as it used to be. OMG, I have to tell you a story. It's about me talking ladies into falling in love with me..."
This came from a person with whom I'd chatted briefly nine months ago after accepting a friend request. We'd exchanged a few texts about the fact that we both lived in Taiwan, and for whatever reason nothing came of it. Probably nothing personal (at least not on my end), life just moves fast. I'd liked and commented on a few things on their FB feed, they'd done the same on mine. But we'd never gotten around to establishing the sort of friendship that would make me an appropriate recipient for a lengthy story about their dating life.
(Again, not mentioning names here - my point is not to embarrass anyone, let alone this person who is probably a fine fellow.)
A month back I found myself muting another person who'd been writing to me regularly. He'd connected with me on FB through a couple of mutual friends, but had never actually met in person. He started writing me regularly, first offering to act as guide should I ever wind up in his town, then giving me suggestions about places I ought to write about at some point. Then things got weird.
Being a travel writer, I'm usually into hearing from people who have cool travel tips about places I write about, or have given some inclination that I may do so, and if we're friends-of-friends, I generally don't mind getting FB chat messages. But this guy kept writing me through FB chat, 300-400 words at a pop in a super-familiar tone that was a bit weird coming from someone I'd never actually met.
Shortly after muting him (he kept writing me even after I'd stopped responding), I wound up blocking him entirely after I'd posted something generally travel-writer-y on my Facebook feed (having a wonderful time at X hotel in Y town), to which he replied quickly "Oh, you're quite close to where I live...you should stop over" - which, yeah, in the context of someone I'd literally never met nor had any sort of meaningful connection with seemed a) weird, and b) just a few words removed from "oh, you're quite close to where I live...I think I'll stop over" for personal comfort.
Back to the realm of useful solutions.
There's nothing wrong with reaching out to people you barely know, or don't know at all, based on some sort of shared mutual interest. I have a number of close friendships that started in just that way. But on the internet, especially over social media, the line between friend and friend-of-friend, acquaintance and acquaintance-of-acquaintance and near random stranger gets blurred.
It's fine to contact people out of the blue with some sort of reason. But anything outside of a few sentences really should come only after some sort of response signifying mutual interest. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
Before sending off a lengthy message to anyone who you know solely through social media, ask yourself the following questions:
1) Have I already established some sort of a connection with this person outside of mutual liking of Facebook posts?
Unless the answer to this is yes, do not proceed to the next question.
2) Have this person and I already been in correspondence about a subject vaguely similar to that which I am contemplating writing them about now in great length?
Unless the answer to this is yes, do not proceed to the next question.
3) Have I already sent this person several lengthy correspondences (on any subject) to which they have conspicuously not responded?
If the answer to this is "yes", the previous two questions don't really matter.
People are hungry for meaningful connection on many levels, and at its best social media can provide an avenue through which these connections can be made. But it isn't a connection in and of itself. Making that kind of connection takes more than just being connected over social media. It takes time and mutual interest, and most importantly, mutual consent.
Without that, you're basically sending out an unsolicited dick pic, only in essay form.
And that's just creepy.
At the risk of being overly Meta, I just spent five minutes looking for the Guardian article online, which lead me down a rabbit hole of checking out a few twitter profiles, sending out a new tweet to promote my own work, and almost sent me to Facebook, since I'd posted it there a week back. It was at that point that I said fuck it, and we're back. Five minutes sacrificed to the gods of social media is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
So in The Great Shallowing I lamented in very broad strokes about how social media is making us all (your humble narrator included) into slack-jawed jerks with the attention spans of fruit-flies and a massive network of acquaintances who we know not as people but as a collection of social media algorithms. And then I suggested that we write more real letters (or at least emails) to people we want to stay in touch instead of communicating through chat boxes. So: Identify problem, offer solution. Caught up? Good?
(But I am going to digress to share something for a moment. Yesterday my Girlfriend was poking around the settings section of Twitter, and came across something under the settings tab that led to a treasure trove of DATA that Twitter had gleaned from her account activity, all in all about a hundred different descriptors, some of which were correct ("female aged 35-45"), others out of date but true once upon a time ("dog owner") and still others hilariously incorrect ("annual income: $250,000") - there was a shit-ton of other minutiae in there, and on mine as well. Twitter allows you to delete it, which we both did. Will keep you posted if this leads to a radically different Twitter experience.)
Back to the now, and one of the likely many corollaries to The Great Shallowing brought about by social media (and here I should probably put for those who easily take umbrage that the opinions expressed in my blog are my own, but if you are indeed taking umbrage do leave a comment below and I will do my best to defend my thinking as long as you're decent about it), The False Deepening.
By this I mean the trend fostered by social media to presume intimacy that has been neither created organically nor requested.
Over the last year or so as my social media community has expanded, I've noticed an increasing number of people in my feed who regularly use the platform to share publicly deeply personal information. One person posted a lengthy essay about their battle with sex addiction. Another, their trials and tribulations with adjusting to life in the country to which they'd expatriated, down to bad dating experiences, deep feelings of culture shock and bouts of sexual frustration.
There are just a couple of examples, and if I'm being a bit vague it's because I don't want to deliberately call anyone out personally (hence the gender neutral pronouns).
Don't get me wrong. My friend Stella posts about everything from sex and personal dating experiences to fisting dos and don'ts and on which date is it appropriate to ask your partner for a golden shower. But Stella is literally a professional sex educator, who travels the country talking about this stuff and writes columns regularly about sex, kink, polyamory and so forth. So when I see on her feed something like
"Last night had date with gender queer millennial; concerned I may have brought up rimming too early"
I don't find it off-putting because a) that's what I expect to see in the Facebook feed of someone who's also a sex educator, and b) Stella is someone I personally know rather than a random FB acquaintance.
Seeing similar stuff popping up with alarming regularity in the feeds of random acquaintances is weirdly off-putting. So my solution (because Snarky Tofu is all about solutions) has been to start gently unfollowing people I don't really know who continually post way too much personal information.
An even more off-putting manifestation of this False Deepening I've experienced recently has come in the form of lengthy ... can we call them emails if they come through Facebook chats ... from people who I've never personally met (but know of through other friends), written with way too much familiarity given the online acquaintance nature of our knowing each other. This morning I got five hundred words of text about an unusual dating experience, beginning with the words
"Making a good impression on the ladies of Taiwan isn't as easy as it used to be. OMG, I have to tell you a story. It's about me talking ladies into falling in love with me..."
This came from a person with whom I'd chatted briefly nine months ago after accepting a friend request. We'd exchanged a few texts about the fact that we both lived in Taiwan, and for whatever reason nothing came of it. Probably nothing personal (at least not on my end), life just moves fast. I'd liked and commented on a few things on their FB feed, they'd done the same on mine. But we'd never gotten around to establishing the sort of friendship that would make me an appropriate recipient for a lengthy story about their dating life.
(Again, not mentioning names here - my point is not to embarrass anyone, let alone this person who is probably a fine fellow.)
A month back I found myself muting another person who'd been writing to me regularly. He'd connected with me on FB through a couple of mutual friends, but had never actually met in person. He started writing me regularly, first offering to act as guide should I ever wind up in his town, then giving me suggestions about places I ought to write about at some point. Then things got weird.
Being a travel writer, I'm usually into hearing from people who have cool travel tips about places I write about, or have given some inclination that I may do so, and if we're friends-of-friends, I generally don't mind getting FB chat messages. But this guy kept writing me through FB chat, 300-400 words at a pop in a super-familiar tone that was a bit weird coming from someone I'd never actually met.
Shortly after muting him (he kept writing me even after I'd stopped responding), I wound up blocking him entirely after I'd posted something generally travel-writer-y on my Facebook feed (having a wonderful time at X hotel in Y town), to which he replied quickly "Oh, you're quite close to where I live...you should stop over" - which, yeah, in the context of someone I'd literally never met nor had any sort of meaningful connection with seemed a) weird, and b) just a few words removed from "oh, you're quite close to where I live...I think I'll stop over" for personal comfort.
Back to the realm of useful solutions.
There's nothing wrong with reaching out to people you barely know, or don't know at all, based on some sort of shared mutual interest. I have a number of close friendships that started in just that way. But on the internet, especially over social media, the line between friend and friend-of-friend, acquaintance and acquaintance-of-acquaintance and near random stranger gets blurred.
It's fine to contact people out of the blue with some sort of reason. But anything outside of a few sentences really should come only after some sort of response signifying mutual interest. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
Before sending off a lengthy message to anyone who you know solely through social media, ask yourself the following questions:
1) Have I already established some sort of a connection with this person outside of mutual liking of Facebook posts?
Unless the answer to this is yes, do not proceed to the next question.
2) Have this person and I already been in correspondence about a subject vaguely similar to that which I am contemplating writing them about now in great length?
Unless the answer to this is yes, do not proceed to the next question.
3) Have I already sent this person several lengthy correspondences (on any subject) to which they have conspicuously not responded?
If the answer to this is "yes", the previous two questions don't really matter.
People are hungry for meaningful connection on many levels, and at its best social media can provide an avenue through which these connections can be made. But it isn't a connection in and of itself. Making that kind of connection takes more than just being connected over social media. It takes time and mutual interest, and most importantly, mutual consent.
Without that, you're basically sending out an unsolicited dick pic, only in essay form.
And that's just creepy.
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