Tag: social media

Threads

Kevin Drum points to this piece by Rebecca Jennings at Vox, lamenting how “boring” Meta’s new Threads app is. Here’s her take, as compiled by Drum:

Logging onto Threads is like logging on to the internet roughly a decade ago. I have now seen two strangers share their “hot take” that actually, pineapple on pizza is good, a sentiment copied and pasted from all the world’s most boring Hinge profiles….Threads is Twitter for people who are scared of Twitter.

….Twitter is a platform that attracts a certain type of person….The best Twitter users aren’t people who are looking for sponsorship deals or mugging in front of a camera; by replicating your follower list from Instagram to Threads, you’re not necessarily seeing posts by interesting or funny people. Instead you’re seeing posts from acquaintances, brands, and influencers, and these are not the people who are going to invent the internet’s next best posting format or a new genre of humor. There is nothing revelatory or novel about what’s happening on Threads….For now it’s simply a much less interesting version of Twitter.

Jennings says Threads being boring, being tame, being a place where you just see the people you decide to see, a place that looks like “the internet roughly a decade ago.” And to all that I say, yes exactly. Thank God. What a breath of fresh air. I know the Twitter bubble is real, so some power users may not understand this, but some of us are sick of social media’s “excitement”, being a place where the loudest and most belligerent are featured, a feed of uninformative crap spewed by people that many of us never signed up to see or hear in the first place. So yeah, Threads is kind of bland and boring and half-formed. And some of us like it that way.

I’m sure Meta will figure out how to overmonetize and ruin Threads sooner rather than later. Big tech is good at almost nothing else. But lets enjoy the moment before it does.

On a related note, looking for a social media platform that will never be ruined by monetization schemes and hyperbolic power users? Try out Micro.blog! It’s a fantastic place to be, a true open-internet place where things are calm, counting your likes and comments are impossible, and you only see the people you want to see.

Buy me a coffee

Social media and the death of friendship

I posted this last week on my person Facebook page, but I wanted to share it here as well. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about friendship and the role it plays in the modern millennial techno-culture that I find myself inhabiting. There is a real tendency among people in my demographic – especially among those you find online tweeting and creating meme culture – to relish in the difficulty of creating and maintaining friendships, and an attendant valorizing of the “self care” of saying no to those who want to make plans. There seems to be real comedy to be found in the last minute breaking of plans and turning down attempts at connection. I’ve come to think of this as a phenomenon called “ironized introversion”, in which it becomes cool to radically embrace the identity of introverted- to the point of refusing to interact in an embodied way with people when it is not required by work or family obligations (and even those are becoming more and more optional for many.) Social life becomes a purely digital and online endeavor, where the other avatars and accounts on social media become more “real” than anything else about people. 

I know I sound like “old guy yelling at technology” here, but I’m really not meaning to. Because I do sympathize; I am an introvert, very much so, although I like to embrace the hubris of thinking I’m a real introvert, and not one for the social credit it seems to bring nowadays. Human interaction wears me out; an evening with friends requires about three times as much isolation afterwards to recover energy. So I get it, I really do.

At the same time, I do work hard to cultivate real, embodied friendships, in the “meatspace” and not only the digital one. I spent the majority of the last two years off social media by and large, and one of my fears in doing so was that I would lose a whole host of meaningful relationships with people who I am “friends” with here. But, in fact, I found that what it forced of me instead was intentionality and active cultivation in my building and maintaining friendships. Sure, the number of people I regularly interacted with in some way went down in absolute terms. But I also became vitally aware of my actual, important friendships, and they really flourished over the last couple of years in a way that I hadn’t really experienced since high school probably (school life is, after all, probably the peak for many people’s experience of real friendship.) Now, these weren’t all free of technology. The closest friendships I built were still over distance, maintained by and large via Zoom and FaceTime and phone calls and text chains. But notice the intentionality found even in that. We made regular, weekly plans to talk, face to face as we could. We hold each other accountable to these check-ins. And, when we could this summer, we all came together for a few days of real time together, time that I look back on already as one of the highlights of the year for me.

So, it really bugs me, the attitude contained in this tweet, that I see so often around me. Friendship is really hard. It’s risky. It’s messy. It can be exhausting. It involved real flawed human beings, so the likelihood you are gonna get hurt at some point is high. I get that. But there is also nothing like it. Friendship – real, honest to goodness friendship, with other physical human beings – is amazing and life-giving and vital to being a whole human being. Family is great, but there is nothing like real friends who are there and present and choose to love you and spend time with you.

Friendship is an embodied thing. It requires proximity and effort and intimacy and vulnerability. And it is a vital feature of the Good and Virtuous Life, for everyone. Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas all teach us this, that you cannot be fully human without the presence of others, without the love of friendship. Yeah, making plans is hard, and leaving the comfort and safety of home can be a lot, especially after a full week of work and obligations. But real friendship is necessary. Other human beings are not consumables or commodities, and they aren’t the stuff of memes and social media irony. To relegate friendship to the digital world and spend a lot of time laughing at your own ability to turn down other people’s attempts at relationship building is to make means of those around you, of which there is no greater sin we can commit against one another. 

So, make plans. Go out. Risk yourself. Court exhaustion. Cull your friends list. Be a friend, a real, flesh and blood friend. 

Why I’m leaving social media, and why I think you should too

I’m leaving Facebook. And I think you should too.

I’ve taken two extended breaks from Facebook in the past, one while I was writing my thesis, and one early this year. Both were mainly to allow myself the time and attention to focus on other things I needed to be spending time on; but both were also largely in part to preserve my own mental health from platforms that I see as increasingly dangerous and damaging. Social media has one goal, and that goal is not to good-naturedly connect you with friends and family and create some form of “online community”, or to be a purveyor of the “truth.” This makes for a good PR narrative, but in reality, the goal of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is to drive ad revenue for themselves and their corporate partners by engaging users, and they have found that the best way to do that is to feed you emotionally-stimulating content. They do this by learning what engages your brain most effectively, and then their algorithm feeds you similar stuff over and over. And what exactly have social media companies learned drives this best? Anger, rage, and hate. Its classic human psychology 101, and these companies know (even if they would never say this in an earnings report or shareholder update) that the best way to keep you engaged and clicking and filling their pockets with ad revenue is to enrage you. Anger is the most visceral of human reactions, and causes us to act in unconscious ways, and these companies know that in the context of a social media platform, those actions will most often be clicking, sharing, and engaging other users. Thus, they work to harness your emotions in a way that is damaging to you, but beneficial to them.

I see this dynamic at work in myself all too often on Facebook. It takes very little prodding to get me scrolling endlessly, getting angrier and angrier at what I see, and then clicking and re-sharing things that, if I took five or ten minutes to calm down and cool off and think rationally, I would never do. To step back from that and realize it is terrifying; its terrifying because it makes you think about how much control these social media corporations have over not just our cell phones and computers, but over the wiring in our brains – in short, how much control Facebook and Twitter have come to have over our humanity. I consider myself intelligent, mentally strong, and emotionally in control over myself; but when it comes to the algorithmic psychology at work in social media, I am little better than a slobbering, screen addicted pair of eyeballs with two working thumbs and an over-stimulated prefrontal cortex.

Its scary and sad for me, as well, to see what these platforms have done to many of my friends and family. Facebook has taken people dear to me, and seemingly twisted them beyond recognition, at least in the digital space. There are people who I know, in the real world, who are kind and good and smart people, but when you encounter them on Facebook (and lets be real, that’s where most of us encounter each other anymore) they are completely different: they become angry, and mean, and thin-skinned, and dumb. I see strong relationships get torn apart over stupid shit on social media, over someone’s comment on something, or their reaction to a post. Its sad, and its infuriating, and it makes me despair for the future of our nation and our humanity.

I also have become deeply grieved over what social media is doing to concepts like truth, and morality, and knowledge, and ethics. I am someone who deeply values the pursuit of what is true and good. I have spent a large number of years and an even larger number of dollars doing academic work in theology, ethics, philosophy, political science, and public policy. The discovery and transmission of what is true to so important to me. I have no issue with anyone who believes differently than me on a whole host of issues; I love good debate and argument! But I hate the turn I increasingly see across the whole spectrum of beliefs and positions away from what has commonly been understood as empirically-founded and sincerely-held values about what is true. There is no hope for us as a community if we no longer value what is true more than scoring points or owning the libs or virtue signaling. Far from being bastions for free speech and truth-seeking and good will, Facebook and Twitter have become hubs for misinformation and lies and willful ignorance. It does not matter, for instance, to a good number of my acquaintances on social media that I have sunk the better part of decade in reading, writing, debating, and learning about theology, of instance. If a political or hot button issue is at stake, then my expertise, and the expertise of thousands of others in countless other fields, is denigrated and thrown aside and disrespected. One growing feeling in my own engagement with social media over the last year or so is an intense feeling of disrespect towards the work I’ve done and the knowledge I worked so hard for. I know this sounds very hubristic, but there are a lot of us out here who put in the time and effort to know things, and know them well, and just because you have a keyboard and a social media account and a Google search bar doesn’t mean you are more of a expert on something or have more knowledge than those of us who have earned the right to be respected and heard and trusted on these topics. Experts are an important part of a democracy because none of us has the time or the ability to become experts on everything, or even one thing. Truth matters. Facts matter. Any platform that degrades and tears down truth and expertise and knowledge is not only bad for you, it is a immoral tool working against our shared humanity. I have no doubt in my mind that the state of our world – creeping fascism and nationalism, a pandemic, dangerous leaders, a deeply neurotic and toxic cultural milieu – is driven in large part by social media. I have no doubt that our struggles here in America to do the right thing and face COVID-19 in a fact-informed, well-planned way is in large part driven by social media misinformation and herd-building tendencies.

So, in a few days, I will be deactivating my Facebook and my Twitter accounts. I intend to keep my Instagram, because I have a very small list of things I follow, mostly centered around food and sports and architecture and books and other things I love. I don’t find Instagram, by and large, to be a toxic space. That could change. It is owned by Facebook. I also will be blogging here, I have a newsletter I send out occasionally (and hope to use more) and I’m on Micro.Blog and Goodreads. Hell, I’d love to start an email or snail mail correspondence with you, if you want to be in touch with me; let’s talk for real! Those tools are all more than enough for me.

But beyond me just leaving, I strongly, strongly implore you: leave Facebook and Twitter behind. Do the actual work of maintaining connections, not with as many people as possible, but with those you most love and care about. Find groups of shared interests in less toxic places. Don’t rely on Facebook for your news, or your facts, or your knowledge of what is happening in the world. Put in the effort. Do the work. Read newspapers and legitimate news sources. Find scholarly journals. Reference online encyclopedias. Preserve your mental health. Don’t be a tool and source of money for folks who don’t give a shit about you anyways. Be a free, whole, proud, and liberated human being, out in the real world. Trust me: you will feel so much better. It may be scary at first. It may be hard. You may feel that urge to pick up your phone and dive back in. Don’t do it. Show us how strong you are. You existed before social media. You can exist after it.