Navigating the social media hellscape
First, happy belated Thanksgiving. I hope your days were better than anticipated. Our Thanksgivings have been low-key since I’ve been in grad school. Since my semester ends a week or 2 after Thanksgiving, all of my final projects are due about now so there is no traveling to major family festivities. We have been, as Jane Austen wrote in Emma, “a very quiet set of people, I believe; more disposed to stay at home than engage in schemes of pleasure” at Thanksgiving these past two years. Although we did engage in a wickedly fun round of Competition Kitchen while the turkey breast was roasting.
But to get to the point of the post…
The implosion of Twitter and the rise of about 20-zillion alternatives, has me thinking about why I should even bother with social media at all. What function does it serve for me, and are there other ways to fulfill it?
I’ve been doing a bunch of reading as I consider how to use social media going forward & I found a couple of posts useful. The first is from Teri Kanefield.
In her post she goes into the weeds a bit about algorithms and walled gardens and the impact our daily diet of social-media fueled outrage & misinformation has on our democracy.
The part that stuck with me is this:
“I was recently interviewed by a person who called herself a progressive. She was shocked that I didn’t agree with everything she said (she repeated to me many of the statements listed here). When I pushed back and tried to explain what was wrong with her statements, many of which were Internet Triggers, she became visibly upset and later in private said unkind things to me. This woman considers herself well-informed and hosts a podcast. My sense was that she lives in a social media bubble where (1) she is constantly triggered and (2) her triggers are continuously confirmed by those around her. Her expectation was that I, too, would confirm her beliefs. When I didn’t, she could only react with anger.”
“Confirmation bias + algorithms encourage extremism by encouraging people to hold narrow views and reject nuance.”
For the record she is not talking about me here, but it got me thinking about whether she could have been.
The second post is from John Scalzi, a writer I’ve followed for a long time on Twitter because frankly he’s quite entertaining there, who recently posted on his blog, Whatever, his plans for social media use going forward.
In the post he talks about what types of content the various sites are suited for, and how he intends to use them. His TL;DR for writers: have your own place on the web that you own and control because everything else is transitory. For him that’s his blog, which at 25 years, has outlasted everything else he’s tried so far.
I’m sure I’ll read more before deciding on my final plan. For now I’m claiming my name on various sites & lurking to get a feel for those places. I’ll post here when I decide my actual social media plan to tell folks which sites I’ve landed on and how I plan to use them.
Right now, though, I am leaning toward a strategy of “reclaiming my time.”
I used to hate Twitter. But over time it evolved into a surprisingly useful social media site for me. It was one place I could go to learn about publishing, writing, books, libraries, science, medicine, news, dinosaurs – all my random interests curated for me by people I’ve followed for a while and whose biases I’d gotten a feel for even if I didn’t always share them. I got to have conversations-however fleeting-with writers and librarians and other experts in their fields that I admire and constantly learn from.
I’ll miss that.
But over the summer I realized that checking Twitter just made me mad. Teri Kanefield points out that this is what it’s supposed to do but the moment I realized logging into Facebook and Instagram just led to me being in a really bad mood after was the moment I stopped logging into Facebook & Instagram. I’ve still got accounts there but don’t invest much energy on them. I visit every three months or so just to check for messages from folks who don’t have other ways to reach me.
That’s what I’ve been doing lately with Twitter as well. Keep my name but no longer feed the beast. Scalzi points out that writers really need to have a web house they own, a constant. For him it’s his blog, Whatever, which has been running for 25 years.
For me that’s Caterpickles, which I’ve been writing on and off for 13(!) years. I’ve missed writing it regularly, and plan to return to a more regular posting schedule next year.
Writing it makes me happy, and happy is a precious thing right now.
What I’m going to do about news and how I’ll replace my daily feed of niche learning interests… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Podcasts? We don’t have cable anymore. Are newspapers and magazines and blogs still a thing? Does Feedly work to compile them? OMG AM I GOING TO HAVE TO READ THINGS ON PAPER?
TL;DR: I’m claiming my name on a bunch of social media, but my heart belongs to my blog Caterpickles (caterpickles.com), so that’s where my time will go also. Also planning to do more old school newspaper, magazine, blog, and book reading. Some podcast listening. So retro.
How are y’all thinking through this?
Taking a final cue from Scalzi, a snuggly cat pic as thanks for reading this.
Canelo thinks time is best spent in snuggly warm naps. (Photo: Shala Howell)
