My social media starter drug was Facebook. I was an early adopter. I don't remember exactly when I joined, but it was shortly after they opened it to non-university students. I loved it for a very specific reason-- I had young children, and we didn't live near our extended family. I had been tediously taking my rolls of film to a drugstore, having them developed, having reprints made, writing a note to include, going to the post office, and sending out photos of our kids. On Facebook, I could post the photos and be done with it. I strong-armed my parents and several other friends and relatives into joining -- you've got to try this! It's so fun!
And I did think it was fun. I loved it. I was caught completely off-guard when there began to be pushback. If you posted pictures of your kids on facebook, you were showing off. You were bragging about how great your life is. You were only showing the good parts and not being honest about the hard things in your life. Whaaaaat? No, honestly, I'm just posting pictures of my kids. There was zero intent on my part to make other people feel bad about their lives. I deleted it off my phone and quit posting almost entirely, but I still checked it daily from my laptop.
And then 2015/2016 happened, and people who would never have dreamed about posting their political opinions online suddenly started to do so, and FB became toxic. I still check in a couple of times a week, because I'm in three online groups that became FB-only years ago, but I rarely scroll past the first two screens. I really do not want to know what my neighbors think. Like everybody, I miss the days when you could be friends with anybody without thinking about it, because we were all smart enough to keep our political opinions to ourselves.
My first switch was to Instagram, and at that time, Instagram was what I had originally joined Facebook for--people posting pictures of their kids and their vacations and the birds on the bird feeder outside their window. I was really into it for awhile. I even started a separate #bookstagram account as a way of talking about what I was reading and hoping to find other book nerds.
But you know, the internet has a way of poisoning everything. Somebody figured out that you could monetize your account, and you could pose your six children in cute outfits and businesses would send you free stuff if you mentioned their brand because nobody (including me) could look away from the cuteness. Or publishers would send you free books, and you could post a highly-edited shot of the $250 set of Jane Austen novels you received for free with the caption, Aren't these pretty? I should read them someday! and get a thousand likes, and I lost patience with the whole thing.
So then I turned to Twitter, which I had joined years earlier but never really used. It had a reputation for being brutal (the reason I had stayed away), but I found that by following the right accounts and not reading the comments, I could avoid the ugly bits. Finally, I thought, I had found the right place for me. Smart, funny people were being smart and funny online, and it was the kind of commentary that is hard to come by in the area where I live. I assiduously avoided, blocked, and unfollowed anyone who made my blood pressure rise--but honestly, once you make it clear what kind of stuff you're interested in, that's not hard. The Twitter algorithms are pretty good at showing you what it thinks you want to see. I didn't post very often--maybe half a dozen times a month--and when I did, no one seemed to notice, so I didn't have to worry about people coming after me.
And then Elon happened, and now even Twitter is ruined. I haven't deleted my account yet, because (to my untrained eye) he's driving it into the ground so fast that it's too soon to tell what will happen. But it definitely has a different feel than it did even a few months ago. Now you see a blue check mark and you think, wait, you're paying for that? Who on earth would hand that man more money? I check in some, but it no longer brings me joy, which it frequently did when it was intelligent people being funny about books and movies and Life In These Difficult Times.
I miss it. I really miss it. Social media is great for someone like me whose favorite way to socialize is people watching. It's a continuous stream of people-doing-things that's available around the clock while you're still at home in your sweats.
But someone always figures out how to weaponize it. Isn't that the sad thing about life these days? Someone always figures out how to weaponize everything. I've been listening to teenagers this week (more on that another time), and it occurs to me that our culture has become like a bunch of teenagers--gossipy, cruel, relentlessly critical, going for the thing that will get us noticed or liked or envied.
This is turning into me being a gripey old person so I'll stop. Re: the long gap between this post and the last one: I decided at some point over the past couple of months that the time for blogging is past, so I was going to stop. I figured that last post would be my last post.
But the thing is, blogging is good for me, in a purely selfish, mental-health kind of way. There's a specific atmosphere that happens in my head, a boggy, bored-with-myself feeling of blah-ness, that is at least somewhat alleviated by writing here. So, I'm not sure exactly how often I will continue to post, and lord knows, and you know, you certainly don't need to read it. But apparently I'm not giving it up.
