Do you feel like you “get” social media, or do you just use it because that’s where all your friends and family are?
This one seems appropriate for the day the blue check died. I have to get to bed but will post this later tomorrow.
This one seems appropriate for the day the blue check died. I have to get to bed but will post this later tomorrow.
No posts
I’m not sure who said it, but I’ve always loved the line, “Facebook is where you lie to your friends and Twitter and where you tell the truth to total strangers.” Those make sense to me. I use Facebook and Instagram to post pictures and see pictures and try to avoid anyone pushing their politics.
I love Twitter as an information gathering source. If something is breaking in real time, there is no better place. I especially love it on nights like the State of the Union or even the Superbowl because there will be some hilarious takes.
For me, it starts to make less with Snapchat. I understand why my kids use it as their primary mode of text communication, but why they’re obligated to send two thousand pictures of their heads to every human relation mystifies me.
TikTok is worse. When I’m on the stepmill at the gym, I watch Netflix, etc. Ahead of me, I can see all the young’s watching nothing but TikToks while they work out. Just mindless video after video from people they don’t know. It baffles me and worse, I can’t tell you the number of times my daughter has asked me to watch something hilarious and it reminds me of watching clips from silent movies or Groucho Marx when I was a kid and trying to figure out how my parents and grandparents sat through them.
TikTok videos all seem so basic and obvious. No windup or subtlety. And mind you, I’m not looking for sophisticated humor. I could watch beefy people fall off rope swings all day, but TikToks seem like 30 seconds of wasted time to get to someone making a silly face.
Even crazier, my niece has a huge following on TikTok. ALL of her TikToks are short clips of her handing a dinner plate to her boyfriend. You don’t see either of them in the videos. Just their hands and the plate of food. She has a few hundred thousand followers and she can barely cook. Most of the time, she’s handing him a cheeseburger and it generates thousands of comments about how delicious it looks.
Then, there is the metaverse. What the hell is that? I wear a headset all day so I can be a cartoon, only younger, thinner, and better looking?
Maybe I’ll understand TikTok when I’m in the metaverse?
I cut all social media in 2020 and never looked back. The only exception is LinkedIn since I use it to apply to jobs and field potential jobs from recruiters.
My Facebook era lasted 2006 - 2014. Slowly tapered off once my parents generation changed it from a place I could goof around with my classmates to a place where suddenly we had to be careful about what we post.
I chased clout on Instagram and Twitter in the mid-late 2010s. Paid for followers. Used Instagram as a dating advertisement landing page. Used Twitter to try and assert intellectual dominance over others.
Social media brought out the worst in me. 2020 was the final straw. All those insane clips of riots every day. People going to extreme measures to get attention. Im still haunted by a particular memory of a girl licking toilets for attention on Twitter. Somehow that went viral and showed up in my timeline even after I had gone to great lengths to only follow quality people.
I’m just done with it. Low value noise, all of it. None of it will be remembered 100 years from now. All that work people do to gain a following and make a name for themselves. Not even Trump or Biden or Whoever the f*ck will be remembered a few thousand years from now. Enjoy real life and real moments with real people around you. The rest is just static noise.