Identity

It’s been a very interesting week on social media – specifically, BlueSky – with a mass influx of new users, the majority presumably fleeing Ex-Twitter in the aftermath of its owner’s embrace of Trump and an ever more overt far-right agenda, and the failure of enough American voters to reject this. Certainly my follower count has more than doubled in a week, and this has created an unfamiliar problem of how to respond.

My approach to social media has always been to emphasise dialogue, or at least to assume that this is what it’s supposed to be about (whereas I think we’ve all known some otherwise lovely people who joined Ex-Twitter solely to broadcast news of their latest publications or achievements, who therefore tended to follow a small number of people-like-them and/or people-they-aspired-to-be-liked-by-them); on the other hand, on practical grounds alone, I’m not going to follow absolutely everyone who follows me. As I was a relatively late adopter of Ex-Twitter, followers there tended to appear quite gradually, giving me leisure to consider whether they seemed like decent and interesting people. Being faced with a hundred or more in a day is a very different proposition.

Now, I’m certainly not going to limit myself to people I know or at least recognise – the whole point, so far as I’m concerned, is to extend my network, and in particular to replicate my Ex-Twitter experience of getting to hear from graduate students and younger colleagues whom I might otherwise not encounter, and likewise to get a sense of things happening in other disciplines. But I do actually prefer to follow real people, and to follow people where there is some evidence that we have something in common. Put crudely, if you’ve followed me but you don’t have a profile picture, your bio is humourous but uninformative, you’re never posted anything and your handle is a pseudonym, I am not going to follow you back.

I have generally posted under my real name – or at least my main account has been under my real name, even if I have also had a couple of pseudonymous accounts (now dormant) for different humourous purposes, the Thucydiocy Bot (still staggering on) and an Instagram account that isn’t intended to be professional. I am conscious that this is a reflection of privilege, and that some people have very good reasons to be pseudonymous, and it is perfectly possible to build up credibility with your online identity on the basis of what you post rather than relying on professional credentials.

But that takes time – and BlueSky doesn’t have an algorithm that is going to boost you into people’s mentions in the way Ex-Twitter sometimes did. It feels counter-intuitive, and it’s certainly the opposite from how I started out on the old platform, back in the day, but I would strongly advise writing a couple of posts, to give a sense of what you’re hoping to contribute to the conversation, before you actually start following anyone. No, no one is likely to see these at first because no one is following you – but when you start following people, at least some of them are going to click on your profile to take a look, and these posts may be what persuades them that you’re worth following back.

So, apologies to mrsmithgoestocleethorpes, you have no bio and your sole post is a repost of someone I already follow – so we may have interests in common, but there’s not yet enough evidence that we can be friends. And apologies to Jim – bio, “A questing soul” – but through no fault of your own, you’ve summoned up all sorts of negative associations that you probably had no possible means of anticipating (first thought: Jim the miserable bloke in Girls With Slingshots whose own men’s support group starts avoiding him for being a downer), and nothing else you say – which is in fact as yet literally nothing – counteracts this.

My shallowness is of an especially pretentious variety, I have to admit; at some point, AI-powered bots are going to recognise that something along the lines of “Bastard daughter of PJ Harvey and Grant Morrison. PhD in queer readings of Xenophon’s Anabasis. Release the Whiskered Myotis!” is the way to my heart, or at any rate an automatic follow. In the age of information overload, we all need our own algorithms, and at the moment, to be quite honest, I’m skipping over a lot of people simply on the basis of insufficient data.