I Guess I Don't Understand Social Media

Back in the early aughts, when this phenomenon called “social media” first appeared, with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the like first coming into the public consciousness, I was a bit flummoxed. I couldn’t quite understand why these sites drew the kind of attention they did. Still, wanting to stay abreast of the latest trends, I tried them. Well, at least some of them. Most of my efforts revolved around the classes I was teaching at the time.

One of the tools I looked at was Twitter. I was doing a good bit of reading that Twitter was a great tool for communicating with students. Teachers were sending out snippets of information for students to consider. Or sending short questions to challenge them. It seemed a good way to continually challenge students. The problem with this, though, was that it required that I be pretty much constantly on-line, frequently posting and so on. I tired of that pretty quickly and didn’t get a lot of supportive feedback from my students so I soon abandoned it.

While I abandoned the platform, many others didn’t. Obviously. But for the life of me I struggled to understand the appeal. Why did I care what someone thought on some topic that wasn’t relevant to me? Why did people feel that they were so important that their every thought had to be communicated to the world via 140 character missives?

And the same was true for Facebook. The original idea behind Facebook, as I recall, was to allow classmates to communicate with each other, make plans to meet, announce activities, etc. And that made some kind of sense to me. But, I wasn’t in school and didn’t have a large group of people with whom I kept in touch (or wanted to!) so, again, I wasn’t terribly impressed by the platform. Only once I began my doctoral journey did I create an account so that I could communicate with my classmates and with my kids who, by that time, were using the platform for their social networking.

Still, I rarely spent time reading through any of the posts and even less often posted anything. I quickly realized that I just didn’t care what so-and-so had for dinner last night, who they spent time with, what they were doing, what their Wordle score was or any of the other hundreds of bullshit bit of useless information that people, for whatever self-centered reason, thought would be relevant to others. In fact, the only thing I use Facebook for now is Marketplace. And even that is a fairly rare occurrence. My friends and kids know that I don’t use Facebook and that if they want to message me they should do it through SMS.

I still haven’t figured out why Twitter (now X) is such a draw to people. Are people so bored of their lives that they need to read the bullshit other people think? Are people so enamored of their on relevance that they believe anyone else cares? Or, are they doing that simply to try to make themselves relevant?

I guess I could ask the same questions of bloggers such as myself. But I’m not posting snippets with the idea of drawing attention to myself. I’m writing for myself. And if someone else likes what I write, that’s fine. But mostly I don’t care whether anyone reads anything I write.

Now all of that said, I did recently create accounts on both Bluesky and Mastodon. My reasoning was twofold: First, those platforms were supposed to be different from the other platforms, so I wanted to find out what they were about. Second, there were a few tech Youtubers that I like and follow who have accounts and I wanted to be able to follow them a bit more closely. But I will very likely delete those accounts soon.

Why? It’s mostly the same shit.

Now, I do rather like Bluesky for the number of photos many users post. Some of them are quite well done and they inspire me to go out and shoot pics. I also run across some decent reading recommendations as reading or writing also seems to be a focus of many of those on the platform. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of “look at me and how much I’ve read!” posts. I don’t care how many books you’ve read. The questions I want answered are:

• What did you learn from those books?
• Do you recommend the book?
• How did the book contribute to your knowledgebase, world view, and/or understanding of some phenomenon?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, reading for the sake of book count is stupid in my view.

Now I do see some value, at least for the poster, in posting how much you wrote today. Within a writing group this kind of information can help keep you focused and moving forward. Writing is a solitary pursuit and sometimes is demotivating. Posting your progress is a means of holding your feet to the fire to keep writing because others are holding you to account.

But there’s also a lot of political bullshit. There’s enough of that elsewhere; I don’t need it pushed into my face on Bluesky, too.

Mastodon is a different animal and seems to be mostly the domain of the technorati. I see little political crap on the site (at least the ones I visit) and most of the posts are drawing attention to a new Youtube video or blog post that is tech related.

Most of it.

There was one poster whom I was following because I mostly liked their videos. I wasn’t enamored of their delivery style because it came across to me as somewhat pedantic and condescending. But the content was good so I overlooked the style. BUT, after following their mastodon for a while I realized that that pedantic, condescending style was their modus operandi. It is who they are.

As importantly, they seemed to want to generate controversy. To be incensed about something. They would post something that seemed to be aimed at ‘poking the bear’ then begin complaining when people responded to the post as would be expected.

And they would post sometimes a dozen or more times a day while the others I followed would post every few days. It was all just too much.

I don’t like those kinds of people. I quickly unfollowed them.

So, I’m back to trying figure out whether either of those platforms is worth the time and effort. I really don’t think they are. And beyond using them as a means for promoting your website, Youtube channel, or whatever, I still don’t seen a need for these platforms¹. I tried to understand but I guess I just lack whatever gene is needed to comprehend their value.