Wading through the online quagmire
Sep. 25th, 2020 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Social media — and our relationship with it — is a topic that's been on my mind a lot recently, as more and more friends post about a) how unhappy it's making them and b) various vicious online blowups in their various social and professional circles. I've noticed many friends talking about how they're trying to figure out a healthy way to stay online while navigating these various miserable and treacherous waters.
Of course we are all different, but I wondered if it would be helpful to talk about my own experiences in these matters. I'm someone who's been enthusiastically online for around thirteen years, and a good portion of my social life has taken place across various social media platforms since then. But around a year and a half ago, I realised a lot of the gloss had worn off, and instead of being a happy place where I hung out with my friends, certain platforms were exacerbating my anxiety, to the point that I spent most days feeling either furious or so anxious that it made me physically ill. I spent most of the next eighteen months using a process of trial and error to arrive at a healthier way of being online. I'm not saying it will work for you, but here's what I did:
Firstly, I asked myself a few questions: why was I on various platforms, what did I like to see/do in those spaces, what sorts of content and activity made me feel unhappy.
My answer to the third question was the same across all platforms: frantic, despairing, angry discussions of politics, particularly if it took the form of a live feed/livetweets, discussing events (with much frenzied and panicked speculation) as they unfolded, rather than summarising or analysing them at length after they'd happened. In addition, I am someone who really, really hates being part of, or witnessing, debate. I know some of my friends find debating ideas an interesting intellectual exercise, a social activity, or something which gives them a satisfying rush of righteousness. For me, I get none of that — debates and conflict, even if they are being conducted in the calmest of terms, make me feel tense, panicked, and emotional. So, since I was using social media for almost solely social/personal reasons, just as I would try at all costs to avoid face-to-face situations that involved debates among friends, it seemed logical that avoiding such things in online social spaces would make me less miserable.
My answers to the first two questions differed from platform to platform, because I was using them for slightly different reasons, but by going through my online presence platform by platform I was able to change the way I used them to curate my experience and avoid the things I found unpleasant, as outlined in the above paragraph. I'll go through the sites one by one.
Dreamwidth: I use Dreamwidth because mid-2000s era Livejournal was basically the internet at its best for me: longform blogging, a community of enthusiastic commenters who replied at length, the ability to create communities based on interests, the ability to control access to what you posted, no retweet/share/reblog button, a chronological feed, no ads, and no selling of user data. Dreamwidth remains this kind of paradise. To be honest, I didn't need to change anything about how I was using it — except that I made a conscious effort to use it more, to post frequently, and with content that invited discussion and conversation, to comment on other people's posts, to make that longform style of blogging my primary form of online activity. I consider it to be my online home base.
Facebook: I'm on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, and I view it as essentially a gigantic, online living room or dining room table, with an ever-changing collection of guests. I'm here because I want to hear about people's hobbies, families, pets, holidays, successes and challenges with work, and, to an extremely limited extent, engagement with politics. I'm not here to witness or participate in lengthy, wearying arguments. I recognised that I couldn't control how OTHER people were using Facebook, and so I ruthlessly curated my feed: I muted everyone who had a tendency to use Facebook to debate and argue with their friends, I filtered every post I made so that those most likely to argue with me wouldn't see them, and immediately this place became much more relaxing. The one thing I haven't figured out how to block is seeing friends arguing in the comments sections of e.g. Guardian posts to Facebook, the comments sections of groups of which they're members, and so on (some of them really, really love arguing in the comments section!), beyond hiding individual posts as they appear, or blocking the entire group/organisation's posts. These curatorial decisions are very much an ongoing project — I tend to operate a three strikes and you're out policy, so I'm constantly revising whose posts I see. Probably next on my list of people to mute are those who just post screenshots of old Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit posts whose source is unclear, and without any contextualising comments of their own. As I say, people are free to use Facebook as they like, and it's my responsibility to curate my feed.
Instagram: much more straightforward. I'm here because I like to look at pretty pictures. The only people I follow there are friends and family, and strangers who post beautiful photos of stuff I like looking at: gardens, nature, food, books, and stationery. I try to keep this platform an oasis of calm, so if any strangers I follow suddenly pivot to constant political posting, I simply unfollow and move on.
Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.) My main problem about leaving Twitter altogether is that a large part of my online social circle is solely on that platform. I've been thinking a lot about ways to navigate this, and am tentatively coming up with a plan to go there once a week (probably Sunday mornings), not look at my feed at all, and just chat to anyone who's around about whatever's been happening in their lives. I'm going to test that as an experiment starting in October.
I'm on a couple of other platforms in a very superficial way, but those four are the main ones, and the changes I've made in the past eighteen months have proved really, really helpful. I'm much less angry, I'm much less anxious, and I actually feel like I have a lot more time and energy, even though I'm probably online just as much as I was before. I'm not suggesting that everyone should exactly follow what I did. But I do think that a lot of people would find it helpful to do a sort of mental audit of their social media usage — what they're trying to achieve by being on each platform, what makes them unhappy, and whether there are any steps they can take in terms of curating their presence and feed to remove that unhappiness. It may be as extreme as leaving certain platforms altogether, or it may be smaller tweaks are all that's needed.
I would also say that it is helpful to remove the sense of guilt you might feel at no longer bearing constant, immediate, real-time witness to all the iniquities of the world. We on the more leftwing side of the political spectrum have been somewhat indoctrinated that this is the morally responsible thing to do, and that not doing so makes you weak, cowardly, in denial, or actively doing harm. I would counter that and say that witnessing this constant, international, online live feed of horrors wears us down and makes it harder for people to do the work to fight against such horrors. Ask yourself: what is actually more likely to achieve concrete results — glueing yourself to Twitter and frantically retweeting things about every political and social iniquity in your entire country (or the entire world), or focusing with laser-like attention on a single cause, problem or issue, and taking concrete steps (writing letters, making donations, connecting relevant people, running for office or supporting those who are) to solve it?
Of course we are all different, but I wondered if it would be helpful to talk about my own experiences in these matters. I'm someone who's been enthusiastically online for around thirteen years, and a good portion of my social life has taken place across various social media platforms since then. But around a year and a half ago, I realised a lot of the gloss had worn off, and instead of being a happy place where I hung out with my friends, certain platforms were exacerbating my anxiety, to the point that I spent most days feeling either furious or so anxious that it made me physically ill. I spent most of the next eighteen months using a process of trial and error to arrive at a healthier way of being online. I'm not saying it will work for you, but here's what I did:
Firstly, I asked myself a few questions: why was I on various platforms, what did I like to see/do in those spaces, what sorts of content and activity made me feel unhappy.
My answer to the third question was the same across all platforms: frantic, despairing, angry discussions of politics, particularly if it took the form of a live feed/livetweets, discussing events (with much frenzied and panicked speculation) as they unfolded, rather than summarising or analysing them at length after they'd happened. In addition, I am someone who really, really hates being part of, or witnessing, debate. I know some of my friends find debating ideas an interesting intellectual exercise, a social activity, or something which gives them a satisfying rush of righteousness. For me, I get none of that — debates and conflict, even if they are being conducted in the calmest of terms, make me feel tense, panicked, and emotional. So, since I was using social media for almost solely social/personal reasons, just as I would try at all costs to avoid face-to-face situations that involved debates among friends, it seemed logical that avoiding such things in online social spaces would make me less miserable.
My answers to the first two questions differed from platform to platform, because I was using them for slightly different reasons, but by going through my online presence platform by platform I was able to change the way I used them to curate my experience and avoid the things I found unpleasant, as outlined in the above paragraph. I'll go through the sites one by one.
Dreamwidth: I use Dreamwidth because mid-2000s era Livejournal was basically the internet at its best for me: longform blogging, a community of enthusiastic commenters who replied at length, the ability to create communities based on interests, the ability to control access to what you posted, no retweet/share/reblog button, a chronological feed, no ads, and no selling of user data. Dreamwidth remains this kind of paradise. To be honest, I didn't need to change anything about how I was using it — except that I made a conscious effort to use it more, to post frequently, and with content that invited discussion and conversation, to comment on other people's posts, to make that longform style of blogging my primary form of online activity. I consider it to be my online home base.
Facebook: I'm on Facebook to stay in touch with friends and family, and I view it as essentially a gigantic, online living room or dining room table, with an ever-changing collection of guests. I'm here because I want to hear about people's hobbies, families, pets, holidays, successes and challenges with work, and, to an extremely limited extent, engagement with politics. I'm not here to witness or participate in lengthy, wearying arguments. I recognised that I couldn't control how OTHER people were using Facebook, and so I ruthlessly curated my feed: I muted everyone who had a tendency to use Facebook to debate and argue with their friends, I filtered every post I made so that those most likely to argue with me wouldn't see them, and immediately this place became much more relaxing. The one thing I haven't figured out how to block is seeing friends arguing in the comments sections of e.g. Guardian posts to Facebook, the comments sections of groups of which they're members, and so on (some of them really, really love arguing in the comments section!), beyond hiding individual posts as they appear, or blocking the entire group/organisation's posts. These curatorial decisions are very much an ongoing project — I tend to operate a three strikes and you're out policy, so I'm constantly revising whose posts I see. Probably next on my list of people to mute are those who just post screenshots of old Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit posts whose source is unclear, and without any contextualising comments of their own. As I say, people are free to use Facebook as they like, and it's my responsibility to curate my feed.
Instagram: much more straightforward. I'm here because I like to look at pretty pictures. The only people I follow there are friends and family, and strangers who post beautiful photos of stuff I like looking at: gardens, nature, food, books, and stationery. I try to keep this platform an oasis of calm, so if any strangers I follow suddenly pivot to constant political posting, I simply unfollow and move on.
Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.) My main problem about leaving Twitter altogether is that a large part of my online social circle is solely on that platform. I've been thinking a lot about ways to navigate this, and am tentatively coming up with a plan to go there once a week (probably Sunday mornings), not look at my feed at all, and just chat to anyone who's around about whatever's been happening in their lives. I'm going to test that as an experiment starting in October.
I'm on a couple of other platforms in a very superficial way, but those four are the main ones, and the changes I've made in the past eighteen months have proved really, really helpful. I'm much less angry, I'm much less anxious, and I actually feel like I have a lot more time and energy, even though I'm probably online just as much as I was before. I'm not suggesting that everyone should exactly follow what I did. But I do think that a lot of people would find it helpful to do a sort of mental audit of their social media usage — what they're trying to achieve by being on each platform, what makes them unhappy, and whether there are any steps they can take in terms of curating their presence and feed to remove that unhappiness. It may be as extreme as leaving certain platforms altogether, or it may be smaller tweaks are all that's needed.
I would also say that it is helpful to remove the sense of guilt you might feel at no longer bearing constant, immediate, real-time witness to all the iniquities of the world. We on the more leftwing side of the political spectrum have been somewhat indoctrinated that this is the morally responsible thing to do, and that not doing so makes you weak, cowardly, in denial, or actively doing harm. I would counter that and say that witnessing this constant, international, online live feed of horrors wears us down and makes it harder for people to do the work to fight against such horrors. Ask yourself: what is actually more likely to achieve concrete results — glueing yourself to Twitter and frantically retweeting things about every political and social iniquity in your entire country (or the entire world), or focusing with laser-like attention on a single cause, problem or issue, and taking concrete steps (writing letters, making donations, connecting relevant people, running for office or supporting those who are) to solve it?
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:16 am (UTC)I occasionally used to check my legal name twitter because of author networking reasons and so much of it is politics, and American politics in particular, expressed in ways that seem designed to make people feel bad, that there just doesn't seem any point. I have muted some people and muted some words, but tbh, I just don't check that account.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 01:30 pm (UTC)I have a professional Twitter account, but I made the decision when I set it up that a) I would keep a rigid dividing line between my personal and professional online lives and b) I would only use that professional account for broadcast purposes (so posting links/announcements was fine, using the account to have conversations or retweet posts from whatever fraught debate was happening in the profession was not going to happen). So far, I'm not regretting that decision in the slightest.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:41 am (UTC)made me feel very connected to people/issues/the world
in a positive way while I was doing it
made me feel energised and full of dopamine while I was doing it
and then gave me anxiety attacks 3-4 hours later and the next day.
I haven't been on twitter for months now, and my Anxiety is SO much better.
By contrast, Facebook and Dreamwidth rarely exacerbate/aggravate my Anxiety.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 01:31 pm (UTC)I'm glad you've got some other online spaces that don't cause such a negative effect.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 12:47 pm (UTC)So much yes to this.
I also find social media navigation to be an ongoing issue. I was only nominally on FB, but even that small presence was too much - I really didn't need to hear the opinions of folks I haven't spoken to since high school - and I deactivated my account a couple of years ago. It's been wonderful. I was on Twitter for work and loathed it, so while I have the account, I don't log on. Instagram I only use when I travel. So not much, recently. :P
For me, I'm very good at avoiding doom-scrolling. Since Trump was elected I skew perhaps too far to staying out of the news cycle; but hey, even if I'm a few hours/days late, I do learn about what's going on and take action if I can.
It's the fannish stuff I've had to cut down on. I guess my anxiety about RL needs somewhere to go, and unless I really restrict my access, I find myself getting all worked up about someone's dumb fandom opinions! It's not even a question of unfollowing, because I don't follow them in the first place, but seek them out. It's rather counter-productive.
I agree about DW, it's the best.
tl; dr: The less I'm online, the better I feel. It's too bad, but true for me.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 01:40 pm (UTC)For me, I'm very good at avoiding doom-scrolling. Since Trump was elected I skew perhaps too far to staying out of the news cycle; but hey, even if I'm a few hours/days late, I do learn about what's going on and take action if I can.
I'm not convinced that learning about news through doom-scrolling is the healthiest or most effective way to learn about it. By its very nature, most of the news you encounter on social media is going to be either fragmentary, discussing events as they unfold (and often wildly speculating about them while having no real idea what's going on), or both. I actually think unless you're a journalist, or an activist or politician specifically working on campaigns that involve real-time unfolding of events, there's no need to engage with the news in this way — better to do so more along the lines of a morning newspaper (even if that newspaper is online) or an evening news bulletin, where everything is contained, contextualised, and presented in detail.
I don't know what to suggest about the fannish stuff. I posted a similar thing to this Dreamwidth post on Facebook, and a friend there was saying that this drive to constantly remain aware of awful current affairs and other things that cause anger is like a form of self-harm, and I can really see her point.
tl; dr: The less I'm online, the better I feel. It's too bad, but true for me.
Sometimes that's the truth of it. We have to make the right decisions for our own situations and based on our own understanding of our mental health, and it sounds as if you've done exactly that.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:05 pm (UTC)With Tumblr, a whole lot of making friends seemed dependent on leaving anon asks on or using their chat program when they had it, and I had e-stalkers for like a decade, so I NEVER had anon comments on for any social media account, and locked up most of them. Likewise Twitter seems to depend a lot on DMs and group DMs. And with Twitter, it wasn't my e-stalkers who got me in DMs but a very very strange woman who came into my dad's life near the end of it and just would not leave me alone. I just don't need people I don't know (or some people I DO know) feeling free to harass me that way. LJ and other places were pseudonymous (I still think of friends as their pseuds!) and anon comments were a thing there, but I turned mine off early and had plenty of interaction with people anyway.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 08:52 pm (UTC)I was thinking this when I wrote my comment. Definitely agree.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 03:49 pm (UTC)I've stopped engaging almost entirely with Facebook, which I think is a kind of self-protection mechanism. I don't know that this particular thing is completely a positive way of dealing with life (I seem to miss some important stuff as well -- I wish there were a way to filter for "life updates that I, personally, think are important," lol) but it's what it is right now. (Before pandemic, I would check it about once a week or so, which I think was a little more healthy because at least I got some updates about friends.)
And like you, I just use IG to follow strangers who post pretty pictures, it's not at all connected with either my real life or fandom life except for following my sister on her fandom account :)
I have a Tumblr, but there was so much negativity and constant anxiety there that even though opera fandom is almost wholly present there, I had to just stop because I could feel it making me feel worse, bah.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 08:01 pm (UTC)I think the anxiety a lot of us are feeling is a deliberate strategy on the part of the social network designers, too -- the more engaged you are, the more you post and comment and increase their revenue. Nobody in that setup gets wealthier when we're scrolling through all contented and calm.
Huh, that makes a lot of sense!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:11 am (UTC)I'm friends with real-life and online friends and family on Instagram, but I'd say they're only about half the accounts I follow. Thankfully they all seem to use Instagram in much the way I do — sharing calming/soothing/beautiful things.
I agree with you about Tumblr; I left several years ago and it was such a weight off my shoulders!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 05:45 pm (UTC)I log into Facebook every couple of years or so. I use Tumblr on and off and also post on Instagram, and both of those are fun but I also have no idea how to make friends native to those platforms and I'm not interested in marketing my brand or whatever. I OCCASIONALLY check reddit for discussions about stuff like the Locked Tomb or Magicians books or comics or cooking. I think Metafilter (I hung out there in the 90s-early 00s) has a fannish scene now but it's also very very political and boy, do the people there love to argue.
Twitter: has been the biggest challenge of all. For much of the past eighteen months, my only solution has been to simply not use it at all, because it made me have endless panic attacks. I haven't looked at it for over a month, and before that I think I went for about three months without using it. My problem with Twitter is that I started using it at the point where the rhetoric in my online social circles was very much a) Twitter is the best way to keep yourself informed of current affairs and b) if you're not feeling upset and angry and challenged by the online company you keep, you've created a privileged bubble for yourself and are actively contributing to oppression. (I now kind of think both of these things are nonsense: there are better ways to remain informed of current affairs than Twitter, and there are certainly better ways to fight for social justice than to listen to a lot of people screaming in despair on Twitter.)
Yyyyyeah. Just....yeah. I do feel like a lot of news is happening there -- it's like an international live global news feed -- but a lot of it's also distorted and commercialized, and I cannot DEAL with all the horrible racist sexist comments, and it also freaks me out for ADHD reasons in terms of focus and....idk, feeling like I always have to race to keep up? Like it'll never be finished? Trumpty is a total creation of Twitter. (And reality TV.) What you say about feeling compelled to keep checking in with how awful everything is and chime in with comments about yes, it is awful! is really very well-put.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:29 am (UTC)I totally agree with you. Arguments make people emotional and defensive, and that's not a frame of mind conducive to reflecting and changing. I don't have the citations to hand, but I'm sure there have been studies done on how to change people's minds (or deradicalise people, or help them break out of cults) and the best way to do so is to build on existing personal connections and experiences, and to take the other person's perspective seriously, with an assumption of sincerity and good faith. (This is obviously hard to do if you feel their perspective is irrational, ignorant, oppressive or fascistic, which is why I leave that kind of work to the professionals — I am not equipped to do so myself!)
I use Tumblr on and off and also post on Instagram, and both of those are fun but I also have no idea how to make friends native to those platforms
Same! I think when I was on Tumblr I made a single unique-to-Tumblr friend, and everyone else I already knew in real life, or through fandom on other platforms. I could never work out how to navigate the unwritten rules — people seemed to make friends by sliding into each other's DMs or reblogging each other's posts with commentary — but then some people on Tumblr would act as if strangers messaging them or replying to their posts was a kind of harassment. The whole thing was too stressful to me!
What you say about feeling compelled to keep checking in with how awful everything is and chime in with comments about yes, it is awful! is really very well-put.
Thank you! I posted a similar thing on Facebook, and a friend there commented that this pressure to remain vigilant to all the iniquities of the world, as they're unfolding, with incomplete information and then make it obvious that you are aware of said iniquities or you are A TERRIBLE PERSON is like a form of self-harm. It's cruel, it's unhelpful, and it reduces people's capacity to actually fight back in a concrete way against all these terrible things.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 06:55 pm (UTC)dreamwidth continues to be a happy social haven for me, amen. especially since tumblr anti drama mostly doesn't reach here.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:16 am (UTC)I agree with you about Dreamwidth, and I feel that even if that kind of anti drama does make its way over here, it does so in a way which is either very easy to avoid (just scroll on by the person's post), or summarises the situation in a more measured and comprehensive manner than you would get if you watched it unfold in real time on Twitter or Tumblr.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 07:08 pm (UTC)Hi this is 100% me. I was looking at old journals the other day and came across something 17-year-old me had written about being in a chat room when two people started disagreeing with each other and how I couldn't sleep and didn't know when I'd be able to go back there. I've gotten a little better at it, but I still go to great lengths to avoid anything that might start a debate. I got super anxious recently when I tweeted about how harassment was not okay and some of the harassers minions' got into my mentions and I had to shut them down (reply + block so they couldn't keep arguing). Even knowing I was standing up for someone who needed support, even though "you should not harass people" seems like it's just basic common decency. Augh.
Anyway, it sounds like you've got things pretty well figured out and that's great! And I'm so glad we have Dreamwidth with its longform exchanges and slower tempo. I've been seeing your open posts and they all look great! I've been wanting to participate but the Mystery Bug really drained me of all types of energy including that for participating in fun things. But I so do appreciate that you're hosting those kinds of conversation. ♥
For me, Facebook gave me a different kind of anxiety - that of not being a Good Enough Friend. I was always missing things (thanks Facebook algorithms), I was never commenting enough, and being around but not present enough to be the kind of friend I wanted to be made me decide to just not go on Facebook at all. Plus my workplace is very social and everyone's added everyone else and I...don't feel comfortable with that? I've always been very private about certain aspects of my life (including fandom, but also things I don't really talk about like growing up in a commune), and there would just be too much crossing of streams on Facebook. So it's easier to just say "I don't use Facebook" than have a hidden presence and tell colleagues I don't want to add them.
On the other hand I have curated a Twitter experience that I find very enjoyable. After muting a lot of keywords and turning off a lot of accounts' retweets I have a feed that is 80% friends tweeting about fandom and daily life, 10% authors tweeting about everything and anything (including current events) in ways that I really appreciate, and 10% randomness. What I like about Twitter is the fannish community. I love longform but I don't always have energy for it, but on Twitter I can get a lot of social interaction through quick, easy exchanges. I've been able to both offer and get support in a way that has made me feel good about my presence there, and as long as I stay in my lane and hang out with my people (and mute all the keywords that spark anxiety and annoyance) it's a good place to be.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-25 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-26 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:43 am (UTC)Ugh, that situation sounds so stressful! Good for you for standing up for the person being harassed, but I can undersand why it would make you feel anxious. Being around conflict is awful.
I've been seeing your open posts and they all look great! I've been wanting to participate but the Mystery Bug really drained me of all types of energy including that for participating in fun things. But I so do appreciate that you're hosting those kinds of conversation.
That's lovely to hear, and of course there is no pressure to participate, especially given how ill you've been. (I'm glad to hear you're on the mend.) The beauty of Dreamwidth is you can choose when, and where, and how to participate, and no one will mind (or at least they shouldn't mind, and I definitely don't).
Regarding Facebook, I have an absolutely rigid separation between my professional and personal lives (to the extent that I use my full name among work colleagues and in professional contexts, and my nickname elsewhere). I operate on the assumption that nothing online is truly private, and my online identity isn't that hard to link up to my real world identity, but I don't go out of the way to do so. I don't add work colleagues on Facebook, I have a separate professional Twitter account which I use, and so far that's worked fine. A friend actually asked me about this, and I realised this rigid separation was only possible because I had a career change. If I'd stayed in academia, my colleagues would have been all my friends I met during postgraduate studies, who know my nickname and personal Twitter handle and so on! So I'm glad I switched careers and can keep my online life separate from my work life.
I love longform but I don't always have energy for it, but on Twitter I can get a lot of social interaction through quick, easy exchanges.
It's really interesting that you should say this, because I found the exact opposite in terms of energy: longform posting (that doesn't have to be done in real time) is much less effort for me than the short-form, real-time engagement that I felt Twitter requires. This is because I feel I can post (or comment) when I'm in the right frame of mind to do so, at times which are convenient to me. With Twitter, it felt like I have to monitor it constantly and immediately respond and react to everything, which drained me of energy and left me feeling burnt out.
It definitely sounds as if you've found a way to make it work for you, and that there are things inherent to the platform that really, really suit you, and that's great! The whole point of this post was not to say 'my way is the best, and you should all copy me,' but to encourage people to do a kind of mental audit of the platforms they used, and ask themselves a) what they want to get out of said platforms, b) what, if anything was making them unhappy with said platforms, and c) what, if anything, could they do to remove those sources of unhappiness and make the platforms work for them. The answer to all these questions is going to vary from person to person.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-28 08:41 pm (UTC)We say that, and then I'm married to someone who did "debate" for fun in school. So it takes all kinds I guess! (But yes, no, I avoid it in every way I can.)
Regarding Facebook, I have an absolutely rigid separation between my professional and personal lives
This sounds very good and very healthy.
The whole point of this post was not to say 'my way is the best, and you should all copy me,' but to encourage people to do a kind of mental audit of the platforms they used, and ask themselves a) what they want to get out of said platforms, b) what, if anything was making them unhappy with said platforms, and c) what, if anything, could they do to remove those sources of unhappiness and make the platforms work for them. The answer to all these questions is going to vary from person to person.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely what I took away from it, too. That, and talking about it made me realize I could actually be even better at taking care of myself, and I went and added another dozen or so words to mute and turned off more retweets. It's already cut down on the Doom Content that was slinking through my existing filters, so thank you for spurring that! ♥
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Date: 2020-09-26 05:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 11:12 am (UTC)Avoiding Twitter is a very wise decision.
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Date: 2020-09-27 09:59 pm (UTC)I use Dreamwidth because mid-2000s era Livejournal was basically the internet at its best for me: longform blogging, a community of enthusiastic commenters who replied at length, the ability to create communities based on interests, the ability to control access to what you posted, no retweet/share/reblog button, a chronological feed, no ads, and no selling of user data.
YES. I've been a serious user of the internet for about 20 years now, and that was the highlight for me, though, honestly, any pre-Facebook-eats-the-world time was great.
I would also say that it is helpful to remove the sense of guilt you might feel at no longer bearing constant, immediate, real-time witness to all the iniquities of the world.
This is something I am consciously working on right now.
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Date: 2020-09-28 06:30 pm (UTC)I'm glad this post seems to have resonated, and that people took it in the spirit intended: my methods are not meant to be prescriptive, but the ideas and questions underpinning them are instead supposed to be helpful prompts that people can use to examine their own experiences online, and take steps to remove any sources of distress or frustration.
And, as I say, there are much more effective ways to a) stay informed of current affairs and b) work to overcome various terrible iniquities in the world than doomscrolling on social media and ostentatiously demonstrating one's awareness. I prefer the approach of comms like
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Date: 2020-09-30 12:43 am (UTC)I wasn't aware of those communities at all, so thank you so much for alerting me to them! They sound like really great resources to check out.
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Date: 2020-09-30 07:56 am (UTC)Glad to have helped! I really love both comms.