Attempting to stay connected without exhaustion
Social media is bad, of course. But not entirely so. Sometimes I think about quitting it entirely, but every time it turns out to be difficult. Despite all the problems with social media platforms, they are a way to interface with a more global, diverse collection of people (users) than any editorial publication can provide, or for that matter, a closed forum/IRC/discord (or? Hm.)
I think that’s also why, on e.g. bluesky (woke twitter), I do end up looking at algorithmic feeds, and not just the chronological following one. (Another may be that at some point I can’t keep up with the chronological feed anyhow, I think.)
But it’s all still bad, so I like to try to make myself less dependent on these platforms. And, on reflection, I think why I stay on e.g. bluesky is not community. I am not a big poster, like most people I’m an audience member, and really most of these platforms are really various types of microblogging platforms – they are more like sets of soapboxes than social gatherings.
I know people do have communities on e.g. twitter and its derivatives, but I do think that those exist despite the platform, rather than using it as intended. These platforms are not facebook (not that facebook has been itself for a long time), and I try to treat them as places for posts, not socialisation (but the borders between those two are fuzzy). This is why part of my way to find alternatives is using an RSS reader.
Because – my problem isn’t that social media are asocial or necessarily make me feel bad (but they do that as well), but that it easily gets all too much. Post after post in an endless stream, and it’s so easy to just look for the next post until I get overwhelmed. But I do want to read articles/updates on certain things I follow – and RSS by contrast is manageable. I set the feed with complete authority, and when it’s empty, it’s empty.
And that’s the problem solved? Not really, I think. Social media still has the advantage of user-to-user communication, whereas RSS is only post-to-user. The algorithms of social media lets you discover new and unexpected things… sometimes. All at the mercy of algorithm-designers and random (not-so-random) fellow users, but still. There’s a dynamism to social media that old-hat platforms (online and off) can’t replicate…?
So I don’t want to quit fully, I think. But I try to have a certain attitude. I don’t expect a village, fireplace or whatever; instead, a place to find Posts and things, preferably things going elsewhere.
Still, I think this – for me- shows the problem with things as they are. Social media feel very random. There’s no curation, and that’s what the old hat media gave – yes, gatekeeping, but also a manageable stream of new things. E.g., I genuinely find it difficult to find, or to get an overview of new books, games etc. Social media platforms don’t fix that but seems to be expected to (looking at you booktok). But it’s wholly insufficient.
And yet, even the publications that do exist, seem to always at some level to cater to social media palatability, filing of the spiky edges of avant-garde, idiosyncrasy or controversy.
I may be too harsh here, but… things feel like they’re stagnating. (And I wonder if this feeling is different from previous times. Previously I’ve hoped for the death of social media because it’s “bad” for various reasons, but I have a feeling that the – ahem – feeling of stagnation is new…)
Maybe there will be some kind of break at some point. I doubt e.g. neocities is that – it feels too nostalgia driven for that (as much as I adore the deeply personal/idiosyncratic nature of many of the sites here). Surely something more novel is in order. Or will we return to independent sites, forums and the like? And pay for journalism – which is probably necessary (and lo, the rise of worker-run news-sites in the anglosphere).
Back to exhaustion: This stagnation, and the lack of alternatives, at least if you want a certain level of connectedness, is probably why I still manage to exhaust myself (not helped by mental illness, of course) through social media, still. My activity goes up and down, and I think the unsolved tensions are part of it. I like the internet, in many ways I grew up here, and to me it remains a primary way of (in my efforts to combat my mental illness, attempting) socialisation but I would like a different one, that doesn’t revolve around microblogging.
Until then, I think it’s a question of staying on, while finding some equilibrium that allows that, but doesn’t invite regular exhaustion.