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Social Media
Aug. 10th, 2016 06:11 pmIs it just me, or is social media feeling increasingly pointless?
I mean, no offence to the friends I keep in touch with through various online channels – you guys are great and I would not want to swear off social media because that would mean losing you, and that would not be OK. But as far as the wider world of social media, that great big cloud-sourced stimulation machine and distraction engine ... it doesn't ping the 'reward' neurons like it used to. Is it that the people I follow for entertainment rather than personal purposes are getting wrapped up in their own lives and not posting as much? (This is true enough for me.) Or are they still posting and I just don't care enough to notice? I fell out of fandom post-Avengers, when I realised I could not summon the enthusiasm even to pretend to care about the Marvel Universe; since then everyone's gone off on things I am not remotely interested in even investigating. But my Tumblr feed has even run dry of posts about whatever the 2016 equivalent of Hannibal, Game of Thrones, or True Detective might be, so something is up. Someone I talked to recently said that everyone was leaving Tumblr for Instagram – I'm not chasing the fickle crowds onto another platform, especially not one that's even worse for conversation and serendipity than Tumblr is! It's not like I've ever seen a penny from all the hours I put into my 'online presence'. Why all this migration anyway?
Nevertheless I still keep getting stuck in my virtual rounds, even though it takes half the time it once did to catch up on it all, even though I finish a round and think 'what did I even see?' It's become so much a part of the rhythm of my day I almost do it without noticing. What would I do instead? What should I do instead? Cultivate a longer attention span and focus for longer periods on what I'm doing? (ha, ha!) That did serve me very well when I was in high school and we only had the one shared computer. But it's one thing not to have the distraction engine available, and another to have it an outstretched finger away but voluntarily refrain from using it, even if I'm only using it to confirm for the fifteenth time today that no, there's nothing online ...
On the other hand, this is exactly what happened with TV for me, over ten years ago now, so it's not unreasonable to hope I may be weaning myself off the Internet the same way. But the people I know who don't bother much with social media are the people who have an engaging social life in the real world, whereas my giving up social media would leave me in what is, more or less, a social vacuum. And I'm not the most gregarious person, but I've had enough isolation in my life; I don't want to go back to that.
So I leave you with this little puddle of thought, and excuse myself to go back to drawing dead guys. Maybe that tells you all you need to know.
I mean, no offence to the friends I keep in touch with through various online channels – you guys are great and I would not want to swear off social media because that would mean losing you, and that would not be OK. But as far as the wider world of social media, that great big cloud-sourced stimulation machine and distraction engine ... it doesn't ping the 'reward' neurons like it used to. Is it that the people I follow for entertainment rather than personal purposes are getting wrapped up in their own lives and not posting as much? (This is true enough for me.) Or are they still posting and I just don't care enough to notice? I fell out of fandom post-Avengers, when I realised I could not summon the enthusiasm even to pretend to care about the Marvel Universe; since then everyone's gone off on things I am not remotely interested in even investigating. But my Tumblr feed has even run dry of posts about whatever the 2016 equivalent of Hannibal, Game of Thrones, or True Detective might be, so something is up. Someone I talked to recently said that everyone was leaving Tumblr for Instagram – I'm not chasing the fickle crowds onto another platform, especially not one that's even worse for conversation and serendipity than Tumblr is! It's not like I've ever seen a penny from all the hours I put into my 'online presence'. Why all this migration anyway?
Nevertheless I still keep getting stuck in my virtual rounds, even though it takes half the time it once did to catch up on it all, even though I finish a round and think 'what did I even see?' It's become so much a part of the rhythm of my day I almost do it without noticing. What would I do instead? What should I do instead? Cultivate a longer attention span and focus for longer periods on what I'm doing? (ha, ha!) That did serve me very well when I was in high school and we only had the one shared computer. But it's one thing not to have the distraction engine available, and another to have it an outstretched finger away but voluntarily refrain from using it, even if I'm only using it to confirm for the fifteenth time today that no, there's nothing online ...
On the other hand, this is exactly what happened with TV for me, over ten years ago now, so it's not unreasonable to hope I may be weaning myself off the Internet the same way. But the people I know who don't bother much with social media are the people who have an engaging social life in the real world, whereas my giving up social media would leave me in what is, more or less, a social vacuum. And I'm not the most gregarious person, but I've had enough isolation in my life; I don't want to go back to that.
So I leave you with this little puddle of thought, and excuse myself to go back to drawing dead guys. Maybe that tells you all you need to know.
