Today, I make a major announcement. I am beginning a journey – everyone is on a journey these days, right? – that will involve me transitioning. This will not include any kind of gender reassignment, you may be relieved to learn, but this change relates to my use of social media. I am not going to stop using social media for as long as I am enjoying it but I have tired of what some aspects of it have become.
According to research, some three billion people are active on Facebook every month. Three billion people gurning for selfies, dumping tons of photos and telling their Facebook ‘friends’ what great lives they have. That is perfectly reasonable if that floats your boat. When it comes to oversharing on Facebook, I plead guilty as charged. When Facebook ‘memories’ appear, as they do all too often, I cringe at the levels of exhibitionism I used to display. There was a time when I shared memoies, which is to say re-shared photos and updates about my life, and if I am being honest, I don’t know why I did that.
I still share photos, usually as part of my ‘profile’ page, I hype this blog, I usually ‘check-in’ at gigs and, increasingly rarely, I share details of where I am. But the days of photo-dumps and frequent status updates are part of the past. Even my oldest son’s wedding didn’t get a look-in on Facebook.
This is not to be critical of people whose life appears to revolve around social media and cannot resist announcing what they are doing at any given time of the day. Clearly, many people love doing this and who am I to criticise? Indeed, the majority of people who use Facebook are old, or at least no longer young, and Facebook can be a useful tool for chatting about things with ‘friends’ you don’t really know and in some instances have never met. I have slimmed my Facebook account down to people I have actually met and while I realise that Facebook friends are not all friends in the conventional use of the word, a Facebook friend is a Facebook friend indeed.
I didn’t check-in at the airport on the afternoon of this year’s summer holiday, although I have shared a decent few photos since. I feel they make my account more attractive to look at. Who doesn’t like looking at blue skies and blue seas? Whether folk would wish to see me loafing around on a sun bed or knocking back a pint of the local ale, I am not so sure. But it is X, the social media site formerly known as twitter that causes me most concern.
Twitter was always my favourite social media page, a combination of quick wit and politics. As time has gone by, twitter became my echo chamber. I block out the extreme right wing social media users and generally read what I want to read. I was getting too angry reading, and sometimes engaging with, people who, if they existed at all, were essentially fascists, engaging in hate speech. Much of it was filtered out on twitter and its more extreme exponents, like Donald Trump and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, banned altogether. Under its new owner, the multibillionaire businessman Elon Musk, Trump and Yaxley-Lennon are back, as are the millions of anonymous trolls from hate farms. X, as Musk has renamed it, is an ugly place.
I am still on X because the good stuff I read, still outweighs the bad, but I am increasingly concerned by the way in which Musk is manipulating the site, changing its algorithms and, allegedly, interfering with the accounts of users, some of whom are losing thousands of followers for no obvious reason and ensuring that his posts appear everywhere on the site. His new found support for Donald Trump, with all that entails, should concern us all.
I really could do with something between the “look-at-my-life-isn’t-it-great?” exhibitionism of Facebook and the increasingly more dictatorial X and I am trying to find it. I am engaging more with Threads and Blue Sky at the moment, two platforms which both appear to be kinder and gentler places than X. Threads, which is part of the Meta empire, appears to be gaining in popularity and while I am still aiming to use social media less than I used to, I am finding it to be a blessed relief.
One thing about Threads is that so far I have no one on a blocked list, something I definitely cannot say about Facebook or X, both of which have lengthy blocked lists, which gives me hope that it will in time replace the increasingly unhinged X.
The most important thing I have learned is that social media is not a real place. Facebook is an imaginary place, which features friends who by and large aren’t really friends and we don’t care about that. It’s essentially an escapist world and I know that during these dark and stressful times we all need a little escapism, perhaps from a Facebook group or a good book.
I don’t need that kind of escapism but I would like to escape to, as I said just now, a kinder and gentler world, a world I have not always, it must be said, worked for in my angrier moments.
Social media hasn’t eaten itself, at least not yet. But it is certain that sooner or later something else will come along, whether something brand new and different, or another form of social media to change the way in which we communicate. And one day, we will all be saying things like “Do you remember Facebook?” just like those of a certain vintage look back at Friends Reunited, Betamax and Vesta curries.
