Now, my first exposure to social media was through the Fotolog platform - I'm not sure if it even still exists or not, if it does I do need to get back there and delete my account as well. As far as I could gather, it was one of a number of platforms that was dedicated to the uploading of pictures, with some degree of interaction between you and your followers. I might've made a dozen posts or so before I abandoned it. But through that platform I did get to meet someone who became my girlfriend for a very short time - Susan.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I do think that the same guy who introduced me to Fotolog was the same guy who introduced me to Hi5, a guy I worked with. This would have been in late 2004, if I'm not mistaken, and that platform I did enjoy for a good while. If i'm honest, the online presence I had on Facebook was very similar to the one I had there, where about 99% of my posts were music videos. I interacted with a number of people there, and what's funny is that it was perhaps the only social media account I had where I in fact knew personally most everyone on my friends list.
What I very early came to realize about Hi5 was just how much of a hook-up central it could be - this was particularly true about any other platform of the kind - because hey, you were only one DM away from trying your luck. I might have been guilty of this.
Of course, as soon as Facebook came along and really exploded - I still remember the message on their login screen stating that they now had over one million registered users - I migrated there. Others came along - Twitter I had and never got its appeal, MySpace was super fun for a good long while, but now that I think on it, most pages were eyesores and eventually they enabled the option to play a song of your choice as soon as the page loaded, and that was annoying as hell.
But Facebook, I started my account there in 2006 and only recently deleted it - it's not deactivated, it's been deleted - and I'd been hating it for year now. Not because of the platform per se, but because of its effects it was having on society - Instagram was to blame as well.
What I was seeing was that increasingly there'd be a number - an even larger number in time - acting like whatever it was their thing actually made them better than everyone else. Like, see all these places I travel to? You're never gonna do that. See all this amazing food I eat? Keep dreaming, son. See all these amazing celebrities I hang out with? Walk on home, boy.
Every single fucking thing was a reason to justify an unwarranted sense of superiority. A constant state of one-upmanship, like if we didn't compete with these people we don't know from anywhere at all, like if we didn't fake our lives to make them seem extraordinary, like if we didn't somehow try to get that extra bit of attention we all seem to crave, we weren't good enough, and whatever the scale our souls are measured on when we die, if we didn't try just as hard as all the others did, we wouldn't qualify for our place in glorious Valhalla among all these fabled heroes, all these keyboard warriors, all these influencers and instagrammers and youtubers whose life was so much more meaningful than your own.
Was I guilty of this crime? Of course I was, in a sense I was. When I finally decided to start paying attention to my Instagram - moreso than I did - it was because I wanted to showcase my record collection. I was influenced, of course, by a number of people I followed whose collections I greatly admired - and, yes, coveted - and that led me to start posting a snippet of a song almost on a daily basis. Also, I started to post an Instagram story every day from a certain point on. I'll admit that my first intentions were pure - I really did want to focus on the music only. Then things started to change a bit. I started worrying about which angle was the best for me to shoot the videos. And then I started to worry about the logistics of my set-up. I went through a few variations until I hit that one quasi perfect choice, good enough to leave me almost a 100% pleased with what I was doing.
My videos weren't tremendously popular - I had something like 1200 followers, and I garnered the most reactions from the same-ish group almost every day. And very few of my post actually passed the 100+ likes mark. It got to a point where I'd post a song I loved, and I'd think that this one would be a guaranteed sure fire hit, only to net some 70 likes or so. These always left me devastated. Why couldn't people see how amazing this song was? Honestly, I valued a like more than a comment - those I could rarely muster the energy to reply to. And posting a story, I had this compulsive need to see how many people had seen it, and who had seen it, and I eventually decided to only check that info every few hours or so, as a sort of reward to myself. Some great reward, eh?
Can you see why all this is wrong? Can you understand why all this happens? I'm going to extrapolate a bit here, and project my reasons on all of us. I don't think I'll be too off the mark, really.
We do all these things because we're lonely. And it may even be that in some cases we're not alone, but we're lonely for sure. I know I am. I'm both alone and lonely. For my part, it's mostly a choice, mostly a way to protect myself. See, I do miss having someone in my life, I do miss the conversations and the quiet moments, I do miss walking hand in hand and those looks people exchange when they're in love, when they look deep in each other's eyes and just smile, because no words need be said. I miss sex and I miss feeling completely spent, my naked body clinging to hers.
But I don't miss any of the other stuff. I don't miss the fights or the silences that cut more deeply than any word ever could. I don't miss feeling afraid to touch someone, because I no longer know if my touch is welcomed or not. I don't miss the death of an intimacy that used to be bigger than the universe. I don't miss the physical distance between two bodies, the distance between us when we walk down the street, the distance between us when we go to bed together - like there's an invisible wall of pain and hurt and misery and heart-rending sorrow between us that makes it like we can't even talk anymore.
I don't miss any of that. And for me, at least in this moment in space and time, the bad far outweighs the good, and I'd rather be alone.
So of course I felt lonely, of course I felt tempted to get all this artificial attention and validation, of course it all amounted to so very little.
Love, attention, devotion, caring, respect, trust - all this has been traded in for a new currency that has no more substance than a dead man's breath : Likes.
I've seen this many times all over on social media, but it always gets me how people seem to miss the point that we can still actively fight and avoid the kind of future George Orwell outlined in his seminal '1984' novel.
There's a bit there - I had to do some research here because my memory can be tricky - regarding Newspeak that's absolutely relatable not only to our present day, but to the 'like' culture we follow. Read on :
'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'
Of this passage, I highlight this line : 'Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.' Do you see how this has come to pass already? What other gesture is done in our modern lives more than the 'like'? You could easly do it hundreds and hundres of times day without a second thought. It's become second nature, really.
'Like'. 'Share'. 'Repost'. Meaningless words that somehow contain multitudes of meaning.
My decision to do away with all my social media wasn't as easy as you can imagine.
My first decision was to temporarily deactivate them - something I did somewhat frequently in the past, but always felt the temptation to come back.
I had to ponder the effect it would have in my life, what with the loss of instant gratification posting something could bring me. Was I going to be able to deal with it? Honestly, I don't know yet. As I said, I've been known to deactivate my accounts every now and then in the past, and I always returned. I have this option, I can return, only not with my old accounts. The question is, do I want to rebuild all those conenctions again? And do I want to expose myself to things that more often than not made me feel unhappy? Not... not really, no. I think I'm happy enough with just the blog, as it is. It's a much more closed thing, I know that those who really matter to me come here, I know that words are read and appreciated, and that's enough. Who and what and how I'll be moving forward without any social media presence - I truly don't count a blog that has 10-20 hits a day as a visible presence - is both a daunting and interesting prospect. I do think that in the long run it'll be much healthier for me in regards to my mental health, and hopefully that'll translate itself to an improved physical health as well.
I'm quoting the great Jon Ronson here : 'The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people. But we're now creating a surveillance society where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.'
While not being entirely voiceless, as my recent rants so aptly illustrate, perhaps now I've found a way to write without feeling miserable all the time.
So, no pressure here, no alarms, and no surprises.
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