It's funny, but I mostly miss sharing stuff. Not the reactions, the sharing. I love it when there is a comment or something, but that is not why I am there. I read a lot of these articles about how dangerous social media is, or how fake, etc. To me it's that most people do not fully grasp that most of the relationships on social media only exist in that venue. Like work friendships. Once you change jobs almost all of those relationships will go away.
But the other thing about social media is, the relationship is always one of performer and audience. My "shares" are the performance, the likes and comments are the audience. My page is really a "show" that my "audience" likes.
I love my facebook friends, but one of the reasons I love all 500 people- an amount far exceeding what I am able to maintain in any other relationship venue- is that I am not obligated to be there. And vice versa. (If someone really needs to reach me they will text or call or email me. Messenger is far too invasive and battery draining to put on my cheap phone. I don't even use the facebook app on my phone.)
And like Google and all of these other platforms that sell advertising, everything I share is being analyzed and processed for advertising meta-data. The more memes I share about wealth inequality, the more advertisers and executives have to pay attention to it. (Or, more accurately, ignore it.)
And you don't have to have a lot of followers to have impact. Quite the opposite. Big influencers are appealing to the masses and generating a lot of advertising revenue. But if you are what I call an "originator" you may not have a big following, but you are the origin of trends and stories.
(These are the accounts the alphabet agencies routinely ask social media companies like facebook to stop promoting. Facebook recently made a lot of changes to their feed and pages so that only people that generated income were promoted. And while complaining about Biden and Trump is still fine, if you are a progressive or radical, you probably have seen a significant drop in responses to your pages, and an increase in jail time for small infractions. I've noticed this particularly among my fb friends and pages that support Palestine and denounce Israel. Even though all of these pages are also strongly anti-semitic, and many are Jewish people themselves.)
I am going to move to Mastodon and Redditt. But I am also thinking that instead of *more* social media, I might just go back to blogging like this. I have about 20 people on fb that I interact with regularly, and about 200 regular lurkers that rarely like or comment, but share my stuff or talk to me about it in person. I can manage that just as well from here.
Here are somethings I really wanted to share today:
I'd really like to see some ejaculation bans introduced into state legislatures this session:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/letters-to-the-editor-what-ejaculate-responsibly-should-look-like-for-men-post-roe/ar-AA14s94C?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=6816ba365d6c4da39c22c97c122a3256
This made me tear up. So thankful they did this:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2022/11/21/colorado-springs-nightclub-shooting-police-identify-victims-pronouns/10753214002/
No comments:
Post a Comment