Sociable!

I left Twitter in 2022, not long after Mr. X bought it and I got a message saying two-factor authentication was being pulled for everyone except paying customers. I was probably looking for an excuse to go, and I didn’t need much of one. Twitter had been my “connect to other authors” place, as well as a way to get in the minute updates on local happenings. To my surprise, I didn’t really miss it.

I’ve dabbled in tiktok, Mastodon, and that whale one too. I’ve had a bluesky account for about 9 months, but I’ve resisted really digging into it. For some reason, despite being a Meta site, I like Threads at the moment, but always with the sense that at any moment, it’s going to get ruined (and it’s coming, probably next year, with ads).

There has been a growing discourse on — *waves hands in the air wildly invoking the spirit of my French ancestors as I reach for the right word* — this ennui about social media. Cory Doctorow introduced, or at least put into the common parlance, the idea of the “enshittification” of social media in now well cited piece in Wired. He was talking about Tiktok, but the day had already come for Facebook, and now Instagram is pretty unusable. Pinterest, which I use primarily as a place for keeping some of my recipes now, is bathed in AI images and ads.

There are lots of issues wrapped up in this for me - disconnection, attention-hacking, and the spread of disinformation, among other things. Algorithm are dictating what we see. To be fair, advertising has always been about attention grabbing and big companies fighting for shelf space that often control what we see in our physical spaces, but it’s now on an exponential scale. The thumbnails on Youtube are often provocative because creators know it’s it’s more likely to get us to engage with the content. And when engagement at all cost is the name of the came, the cost is high indeed.

It’s also exhausting. It’s one thing to provide me ‘more of things I like’, but there is a fine art to ensuring I’m not just consuming slightly different flavours of the same thing. I mean, I like ice cream ALOT and would probably eat it everyday if I could, but my jeans, nevermind my joints, would have something to say about that. that a non-stop diet of ice cream.

I think this was best summed up by The Cozy Creative in a recent video blog post which I really encourage you to watch. First of all, her vibe is refreshing and feels very much like she’s just talking to you across a kitchen table, but she digs into this sort of feeling I’ve been struggling with for at least a year (and probably more). And it’s about this lack of community and lovely chaotic randomness that the internet of the early 00’s used to be.

**Gazes into the middle distance in a moment of middle age nostalgia

I don’t know what that perfect online place is, and maybe it isn’t just one. Even the best swiss army knife doesn’t do the job of a good pair of scissors a dedicated screwdriver can do on it’s own. I think there needs to be a rhythm between finding a happy place for you and finding a way to expand that happy place so it doesn’t feel like a non-stop buffet of ice-cream. This can impact creators (like me) who may have interests in 10 things but alas, if you talk about more than one of them, the algorithm then punishes you doing so. It seems not to understand that I may enjoy that perfect mint chocolate ice cream AND a lovely spinach salad.

Dear reader, I contain multitudes. You do too.

The seemingly endless “engagement race” is exhausting, and pushing me away from engaging at all. It’s just empty calories and flash, like those stupid instagram cakes that are 10 pounds of icing and sprinkles that is solely meant for show and never something I would actually want to eat. As an author, this is why I’ve started to really invest in my newsletters. I can talk about books, about cozy things, nice recipes, or whatever. And why I appreciate good off the wall content.

On the east coast of Canada, where I live, “Sociable” is a toast you yell out at a pub, or in your kitchen when you’ve got a house full of people and you’re about to toast your friends - usually there is a band involved, and mugs of beer. It’s about being with people, having a nice time and delighting in each other’s company. Emphasis on delight.

I don’t expect social media to replace those sociable experiences, and maybe part of this ennui is that this is exactly what we are expecting of it. Or at least, maybe I am, and maybe I need to get out a little more.