It's all the same

This is the rare post that I actually edited from a draft I made a few days ago, and also may be my last post for a while as somewhere in here I got to thinking there's a difference between me writing something to have it be read and writing something to have it be written.

Anyway. This is a loose collection of my own personal thoughts about how social media somehow does not connect us and in fact makes disconnection worse. It's very navel gazy, but I hope you'll enjoy. It was, after all, written to be read.

I'll start first with the observation that I think hobbies are kind of rare these days. The idea that young people don't have hobbies in the same way comes from a couple places: several posts I observed on tumblr and my own personal experience. This is the "what do you do for fun?" story, where my husband asked me that very question when we first met and I didn't have an answer. I had given up writing a couple of years prior in the middle of a busy NaNoWriMo in my grade 12 year, and hadn't done so very carefully, and I felt I didn't have time to read with my busy university schedule (and this was even while I was living on a meal plan). Those had been my two main hobbies for years. This was also in the mid-2010s, and in retrospect now I can see this was the beginning of social media really starting to take over people's lives. I say this as someone who genuinely lived through a period that saw the beginning of facebook, youtube, instagram, snapchat, tumblr. I remember when those things were new, and they were very different. facebook in particular I remember changing quite a bit in the mid-2010s to be a lot more focused on ads and business pages and suggested posts, etc. we were all being kept on the platforms longer, and this was before even vine existed. now it's so much worse and you don't really realize that until you look back.

If I didn't have hobbies, I didn't conceptualize of this as a problem until I was asked that question. that age is classically the age where one establishes their identity etc, so it's also not unreasonable that I would have had a crisis about the same thing around that time (he asked me this when I was 19). Who was I as a person? How was that connected to the things I did with my time? I'd never stopped to ponder those questions before, and in a way I didn't really realize that's what the problem was. 

But everyone was online. it wasn't just me. And yet somehow that wasn't a unifying, connecting experience in the same way it was when I'd attend writer's groups with a bunch of middle aged women in my hometown denny's restaurant, or when I meet up to play board games with friends, or when I used to go swing dancing. I may have engaged some with those activities online- one could connect with people on the nanowrimo forums, for example, or play video games with others online, or join swing dancing groups. But just doing that itself was never the same. and this is assuming that the online activities are connected to a real life hobby- a lot of people online were just sort of there. Still are. just passing around memes, watching shows and movies, having extremely bad discussions about serious political topics, whatever. I also find that more modern iterations of social media require less incentive to produce content yourself. Think about facebook in the early days, vs tiktok now. There are probably millions, if not billions, of tiktok users who use the platform for nothing except to consume content. They're just there to watch, maybe use some of the fun filters on themselves. That's how I used it. Facebook in the early days was nothing if people didn't post shit about their lives, share photos, updates, etc. You could just go on there to consume, but your audience was allegedly just people you cared about anyway.  But now you can go on facebook and be fed content for hours. I've been sucked into that. my husband still is. and the crazy thing is, probably 99.9% of that content isn't even from people you know or personally care about that much, or even from a person's profile. it's from a page. 

The point is that a lot of social media experiences now aren't really very social for most people. They're parasocial at best, and mostly involve the consumption of information. Endless amounts of it, about the most random things. I found myself going down the path of watching every video I came across about parenting "just in case/for later." Eventually I realized I was spending my precious time watching videos to get information about a subject that wasn't even relevant to me. I don't have kids and probably won't for several years, what's the chance I actually remember all this shit from random videos about a topic I didn't even actively seek out? And that last part made the experience worse. I had to manually scroll past videos with children in them at all in order to get the algorithm to stop showing me that content. The second I saw a child I just skipped it immediately without watching it at all. I had to do this for two fucking days. The fact that I had to, and that I did it, is really strange to me when I think about it. 

I was just being provided information + entertainment (infotainment is a useful portmanteau, but I didn't really want to just use it here) at random until something grabbed my attention. That's all I was doing. My hobby was taking in information. Just like everyone else. And despite that, I didn't feel some sort of connection about it. I didn't feel like I was part of a community of people using these apps together. I mean, fuck, in every ad you've ever seen for these platforms, they feature people using the platform to... plan and do things in real life. But online, everyone is lying, and the basic rules of internet safety dictate that you should not plan to do things in real life with people you have only interacted with online. So these online platforms are at best a way to facilitate you doing real life things with your real life, pre-existing friends. At worst, it's a way for you to feel like you are communally connected with others while not actually doing so. It disguises parasocial relationships as social relationships. 

I had come into this wanting to describe it as we're all having the same experience yet somehow not connecting. We all need to do something to unwind, and now we take the easiest and most accessible option. But instead of everyone finding interesting things to do that connect with their own personal skills and interests, we all do the same exact thing, and life is reduced to a flat monotony with no opportunity for connection. It's so bland.

The notion of what I spend my time on is top of my mind these days, obviously, and that connects back to social media. I was scrolling just to scroll, just to be entertained. It was entertainment with nothing that I got out of it. It was a bland monotony, only on the surface customized to who I am as a person, never allowing me to connect with others. It made me just like everyone else yet somehow paradoxically prevented me from connecting with everyone else. We're all the same and we're all lonely and somehow we can't bond over that. That's why I don't want to go back to fucking instagram.