One of the reasons I stopped updating this is that I think my standards of what qualified as content were too high. I think I need to feel like what I’m saying is profound or entertaining to even write it down. No more!
I am going to try and post something a few times a week without trying to judge it wish some criteria.
Why do so many YouTube videos start with, “Hey Guys!”
Is it a greeting? A sign that this isn’t a TV show or a movie and it’s something more intimate. I think it started that way, but now it seems to be a code for a specific kind of video.
“Hey guys!” is intended to signal that the personality of the person in the video is more important than the content. That this is one of a series of videos, and the person is watching them for the host over the individual content of a single video. The content is secondary to the relationship the viewer has with the host. It says there’s a group of us that meets for these videos, and I hope you’ll join us.
People say it on their first video as if it’s an incantation that creates a community.
Of course, at this point, if everyone says it all the time, isn’t it the opposite of intimate and meaningful? At this point, doesn’t it just mean, “this is a YouTube video. I hope you like me.”
Smash that like button and smash that follow button! It really helps the channel.
People with large Twitter followings dismissing Mastodon has made me think about Seth Godin‘s permission marketing question, “Would they miss you if you were gone?” His point is that sometimes you fill a category without being distinctive. A restaurant at the airport has a captive audience, so it doesn’t need to be great. Just fine. You’re hungry, you get a sandwich. It benefits from being generic or loud. However, if that restaurant moved a block away from your house, you’d never go there.
No one goes to the airport to eat.
Twitter, through its algorithm and desire for engagement, pushes these generic accounts that represent a specific point of view.
If you aren’t forced to look at them and react, do you really care about them? Is one left-wing or right-wing outrage account that much better than another?
How many times do you need to see a stupid editorial from the NYTs that no one would have read if everyone weren’t tweeting about it? Or a quote tweet of a horrible opinion that you’d rather not see.
The reason they don’t want to leave is that it will prove that no one will miss them when they have to provide community and thoughtfulness.
There is power in the realization that you don’t need to have an opinion about everything.
The great Twitter meltdown and migration to Mastodon have started me thinking about identity on the internet.
Every time you start an account in a new location on the internet, you can decide how much of yourself you want to share. Or, more correctly, what parts of yourself you want to share. Most people lurk, which means they show nothing. If you just like things, it can feel like you’re encouraging people who think what you think without committing to actually taking a position.
Here are the levels of social interaction on social media. Obviously not all-inclusive, and there is some variation in different networks.
Choosing to interact with something after you’ve investigated it is an intentional expression of identity. Reddit is an excellent example of a social network that people look at but choose not to participate in. Google even adds the word “Reddit” in suggested searches because they know that people are not in the eco-system of Reddit and they want to point people toward useful information. They want the information without being part of Reddit.
Most people haunt a location before deciding to add their affiliation to it to their identity. And that’s just in private. The next step is to actually create an account. Even after this happens, some users can try and backtrack. “I only created this account to follow the posts from my local police department.” This allows them to feel superior to the social network and reject it from their identity even if they end up following a hundred accounts.
In creating an account, the first step is choosing your username. To remove the “identity” part of this process, a lot of social media sites will suggest a username, so you don’t have to think about or think it defines you. This is why you see so many usernames that are just a first names with a string of numbers after them. The user is not taking ownership of their own name, they can shrug and say, “That isn’t me; it was just chosen for me.”
Now that you have a name, what do you want to look like here? Do you want your actual face to represent you? Your dog? An aspirational picture of what you want to be? You can leave it blank if you don’t want to limit yourself.
Right next to that is a bio. Do you fill it out? Which parts of yourself do you want to highlight? Do you want to lie? Tell the truth? Brag? Be humble?
Why join a social network if you’re not going to pick a picture to represent you and write a short bio to find other people like yourself?
I think it’s about feeling inferior or superior to the location. Fear of being judged or having the ability to judge because you aren’t REALLY there.
Part 2 coming soon
Welcome to my unboxing post. Imagine me opening the pristine package containing this blog and then inhaling deeply that new blog smell.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll be posting here, but since social media seems to be imploding, I thought I would carve out a corner of the internet just for me. I didn’t want to tie myself to a theme with this blog, just a place for me to type some thoughts and observations.