It’s been an interesting time since returning from my cruise on 22nd October. The interest being I may be witnessing my second disengagement from a social media platform. This is a big thing, not least because social networks are nefarious and psychologically sticky beasts, but because of the impact doing such a thing can have on the way you think.
Once upon a time
A long time ago, in a time substantially more innocent (or some might say sensible) than now there was a social media platform that I sort of fell in love with. I fell in love with it so much that my mother made a birthday card of my postings for me on my birthday.
That card represented everything I loved about the platform at the time.
You see I was using the platform to do something quite old-fashioned. It was essentially an internet-available scrapbook not that dissimilar to the conventional scrapbooks people would construct about parts of their lives. It was a mixture of thoughts and images that overall, and within acceptable tolerances, gave an authentic understanding of a person.
People were not just posting what they had for breakfast.
What was great was I wasn’t the only person doing it. It’s not what everyone was doing but enough people were that you could form a tight network of people from across the globe (the MBA helped with that) and the observations and discussions about their lives and the cultures they lived in were genuinely interesting.
That platform was Facebook.
It’s at this point that people would probably dispute this on the basis that these halcyon Facebook days never truly existed. I don’t care about it enough to die on a hill about it but it did exist. Then Facebook changed and seemed to become less a personal scrapbook and a way to get news and other people’s opinions rather than their experiences and we all know where that ended up.
A lot of us ceased to use it other than the odd personal group or sharing the odd photo with relatives who are still using it and getting radicalised along the way from everything to do with immigrants to strange local politics they were ‘informed to be outraged about’. We all know the ‘I read this on Facebook’ family members.
The ‘loss’ of what Facebook used to be I did miss.
Social media crack
Recent events have had me asking the question of whether Twitter had a period in which it was actually positive and enjoyable? I’ve had to admit the answer was no. It’s not that it’s been a continuously annoying or harmful experience but there are no halcyon days, just days when it was present without being a torrent of annoyance and dumbfuckery.
When you think about it like that it’s hard to mourn its potential loss. So I haven’t and my October cruise has been a sort of watershed. Since returning I’ve posted substantially less on Twitter and I’m continually in a frame of mind of why am I about to post that? This usually results in me not posting it.
All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
J M Barrie, Peter Pan
It doesn’t help that I’ve become increasingly tired of the conversations on Twitter. One of the things that come with age isn’t that you feel you know better (though that is the case for some) it’s just that it’s often the third+ wave of this idea or the hundredth time this has been discussed. You either already know the endpoint or you already know what ideas and principles the discussion will distil down to. I’m not saying there is nothing new ever, or that a new generation having that discussion is not a great thing, just accept that some of us might not exactly find your exuberance or hot takes that fascinating.
I don’t know better, I just know where it’s highly liked to end with a high degree of statistical significance.
A Twitter culture (I realise it’s not just Twitter but it’s where I encounter it the most) formed that is also tiresome but also very toxic. The grifting of negativity to feed the algorithm. The descent of media criticism into absolute idiocy. Branding being too tied to identity. The way literally everything becomes radicalised and has to be a crusade rather than just a conversation and every conversation may well be being perceived as an argument by any random person you’re engaging with.
Will I really miss that? The answer is no.
I spent too much time on Twitter and I do feel like I’ve broken some sort of psychological hold on me. I don’t believe I was suffering from some sort of social media Stockhome Syndrome as I had curated my feed to avoid most of it or experience it like a distance tremor in the force but do I really need it? No. Will I abstractly miss some of the people I did engage with? Probably, but also probably not enough to stick around.
I also don’t have anything to sell. Yeah, it’s a bit weird that I’ll have no mass social media to shill these posts or my latest video but it’s not like I’m really serious about growing these things and the numbers probably tell it didn’t generate traffic anyway it just felt like I was at least trying.
The dangerous vacuum
I’m not an expert so I am very much at risk of speaking absolute bollocks but I tend to think Twitter will:-
- Not die and will continue
- It will become the home of right-wing nuts
- Failing (2) it will just become the battleground for crusades and radicalisation
Everyone else will leave. A bit like Facebook it’ll become a sort of demographic and / or political space with a few limited uses for everyone else and there will be a grand diaspora. I do think we may have passed the Rubicon on that.
If I don’t use Twitter as much what will send me to Urban Dictionary twice a week?
Fandomlife.net
While I may not miss it. I’m in a bit of a privileged position with respect to that. I’m not in a marginalised group. At least at the moment, I’m not in a struggling economic group. I have less of a need for an outlet to fight for my reason to exist or my struggle to survive politically or economically.
I’m not ignorant of this fact for others though, as Twitter did do something. I experienced numerous societal shifts largely through Twitter, the Me To movement and Black Lives Matter was mostly experienced through Twitter. I’ve become more aware of different gender roles and the way people think about them primarily through Twitter.
I mostly get my news through Twitter and different opinions on said news which would then be suitably looked into to form my own, informed opinion (in the real sense of the word not the conspiracy nut job sense this has been co-opted to mean).
Where would that have come from if Twitter didn’t exist to me? Would I have found them another way? Would those who weren’t just learning from it but actually experiencing it have found another way to express their views? If it became unusable would I need to start watching traditional TV again? It’s hard to say and I’m willing to accept I’m not the person with the best take on answering that.
I think it’s safe to say there would have been some sort of vacuum though and it’s that which I think about more as Twitter changes rather than whether I’ll be able to post to it or not.
Enter Mastodon
So I have a Mastodon account, but I am engaging with it in a very different. I tend to post a lot less and look at it a lot less. This is for a couple of reasons:-
- I tend to consider the value of each post
- I seem to have moved to a philosophy of ‘why would people want to know that’
Some of this is Mastodon’s doing as I am on a server that is supposed to be about role-playing game discussions though I’m sure it extends into general media and games without breaking any rules. I’m also viewing it more like a traditional forum with federation and you certainly didn’t post as randomly on those forums back in the day.
Mainly it’s about a difference in my psychology. Mastodon just helps.
Do I think Mastodon is going to survive this grand diaspora should it continue and it be the primary beneficiary? No. I realise this sounds really negative but that’s not how I mean it. The truth is if Mastodon does become the home of a sizeable Twitter diaspora that influx will not just conform to what Mastodon was both will bend and change and something different will result. The third wave influx to the server I am on that happened just before the weekend this post went live seems to validate that.
And I hate to say it but human nature is a constant and not all of it was a virgin birth from the mythical algorithm. It’s a bit like a grand science fiction show in a sort of microcosm of internet reality in which the question is asked: do the colonists truly leave the problems of their homeworld behind?
And, Finally…
The loss of Twitter either in reality or as a personal choice to migrate away from it like many did from Facebook in years gone by will leave a vacuum. With respect to myself, it will be a vacuum of not having an outlet for certain things, but I’m not deluding myself that those things aren’t relatively innocuous and I was probably deluding myself psychologically it was a true outlet anyway.
The more worrying thing in this potential change is was what it means for those advocating actual struggle. Yeah, some of it is tiresome and identity grift, but we’ve seen real social change either play out or be reflected in Twitter and potentially losing that is interesting and challenging in terms of actually coming across it and being a springboard to learn about it.
However bad Twitter got and how difficult the noise was to penetrate, it was still a way to hear other voices. Hopefully, that won’t vanish as that is what the true loss would be.