Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: cranky
  • Music: The theme from Pokemon X.

Social media saturation.

There's a trend I've been noticing lately: everything is suddenly everywhere. I think this may have something to do with the emails I receive daily that are literally checklists of every social media site in existence, complete with a handy "be sure to like this here! Be sure to tweet about this here! Be sure to make a witty Tumblr post complete with reaction .gif here! Be sure to..." and I don't know what comes after that, because I have already deleted the email and gone off to interact with something less exhausting. I have enough trouble remembering to promote myself; I can't take on the responsibility of promoting everything I come into contact with.

It feels like the signal to noise ratio is getting skewed; everything is a sea of signal boosts and endorsements and link-backs and that's lovely, if they're things that you support and believe in. I try to post and tweet and yes, Facebook and the rest about things that I care about. But I don't care about everything in the universe. That would be exhausting.

I wonder if we're just all drowning, and thus all afraid of being overlooked. Whatever it is, I admit I'm getting a little tired of being told how to use my social media. "People will be more likely to notice this if you tweet it!" Well...yes. But then they're less likely to notice my awesome Pokemon.

Everything's a trade-off.
Tags: contemplation, technology
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  • 62 comments

soon_lee

November 12 2013, 18:10:37 UTC 3 years ago

I am annoyed by the exhortations to retweet/share/repost "if you agree", with the implication that you are somehow disagreeing if you don't.

Thing is, I may well agree that animal cruelty is bad, or we should honour those who died fighting for our way of life, but I don't necessarily need to make a song & dance about it. This sort of thing makes me feel like I'm being subjected to passive-aggressive emotional blackmail.

seanan_mcguire

November 12 2013, 18:12:16 UTC 3 years ago

Ugh, such yes.

I agree with a lot of things. If I agree with them all at once, they start to lose their meaning.

autographedcat

3 years ago

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soon_lee

3 years ago

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autographedcat

3 years ago

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vixyish

3 years ago

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maladaptive

3 years ago

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carmy_w

November 12 2013, 18:10:46 UTC 3 years ago

I have finally gotten to the point of saturation on my main email; I got on so very many lists of national political entities that I was swamped. Now I just do a wholesale delete of them all unless I happen to find one that actually sounds interesting (a few petitions, that's mostly it), or if it's a campaign for my state.
My social media frustration at the moment is with tumblr. Why in the world am I getting an auto-generated email telling me to go look at what's happening on tumblr when I'm already logged in on tumblr??? That's just stupid.

seanan_mcguire

November 12 2013, 18:12:27 UTC 3 years ago

YES.

WHY.

MAKE IT STOP.

carmy_w

3 years ago

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umadoshi

3 years ago

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carmy_w

3 years ago

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umadoshi

3 years ago

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vixyish

3 years ago

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dragonsong

3 years ago

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carmy_w

3 years ago

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dragonsong

3 years ago

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lilrongal

3 years ago

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carmy_w

3 years ago

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sdelmonte

November 12 2013, 18:14:30 UTC 3 years ago

This is pretty much why I am not on Twitter or Facebook. The unending sea of retweets and posts and updates and endless noise far outweighs any benefit of using such services. Much better for me is the relative calm of LJ and of the old fashioned message board.

seanan_mcguire

November 12 2013, 18:15:21 UTC 3 years ago

I like Twitter when I'm using it; I dislike being told what to put on my own Twitter. Just...just don't.

Argh, people.

jenfullmoon

3 years ago

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reedrover

November 12 2013, 18:31:33 UTC 3 years ago

I just got back from two weeks in South America, most of which was spent completely unplugged from all interwebs. I caught up on LJ and G+ in about two hours, complete with the responses I wanted to make, and considered that time reasonably well spent catching up on my social circle. I care about what people think when they have their own reactions and introspections and happenings to present, hence my love for LJ. (I also read the BBC news site to learn about the typhoon in Asia, among other major events.)

I do not have Tumblr, Facebook, or Twitter accounts. I don't care all that much what acquaintances/strangers think is cool just for coolness' sake. I don't think my life is less wonderful because I don't read/forward/like/favorite every social cause or interesting graphic. While I might express interest about my second cousin's third child's latest loose tooth if we happen to have a phone conversation, I don't think I need to see a photo of it so that I can "like" it to my friends.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 18:59:10 UTC 3 years ago

Fair and balanced use.

r0sew00d

November 12 2013, 19:37:27 UTC 3 years ago

There's a gratification that comes of being retweeted a lot, so I can see why people go out of their way to solicit them. Doesn't make it any less obnoxious. On the promotional front, there's only so much you can do without (1) becoming a shill machine for others (2) having less time for your own valuable work.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 18:59:23 UTC 3 years ago

Basically, yeah.

idancewithlife

November 12 2013, 20:24:21 UTC 3 years ago

And to be totally cynical, most of the "always use all the social media for everything!" is an effort to mine more data from us to better target us with ads by social media providers. I recently started trimming everything but LJ. I look at some Tumblrs, but don't have my own account. I have lists set up on Twitter, but my "master list" of things I want to look at every day is getting shorter.

So...agree :-)

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 18:59:36 UTC 3 years ago

Yeah.

rhoda_rants

November 12 2013, 21:07:17 UTC 3 years ago

I'm thisclose to caving and getting Twitter, but even though I know my own limits and would pretty much ignore pressure to Do This Thing (because that's how I've always been with social media), I still see so many of the people I wouldfollow getting scads of comments of nothing but "AAAAAADDDD MMMEEEEE!!!!" Gah. I don't have/need eleventy-billion "friends."

I ignore all my FB emails already. If I was interested in what was happening on my FB account, that's where I'd be.

greyduck

November 13 2013, 22:31:30 UTC 3 years ago

One nice thing about Twitter lately is that a lot of the "OMG FOLLOW MEEEEE" from years past has died down, and it's really easy to spot the accounts who are purely shills for follows and retweets and cut them out of your Twitter life, provided you ever added them.

Just about the only thing that gets out of hand on my timeline nowadays is when two-or-more people I follow get into an at-reply conversation (you can turn that off but it's useful to me more often than not, so) which goes on for a while. Of course, sometimes those are entertaining as hell (Seanan & Ursula and/or Scalzi and/or etc).

seanan_mcguire

3 years ago

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sirfox

November 12 2013, 21:25:17 UTC 3 years ago

I think that a lot of it is the burblings and convulsions of a growing, changing, evolving technology that's trying to become profitable in a new and uncharted wilderness of possibilities. Most of the marketing money gets spent on anything it takes to get eyeballs on their ads, banners, autoplay-on-rollover-video-goddamnithowdoiMAKEITSTOP?! and the like.

It's all sort of in direct competition with paying attention to the communication you were trying to have in the first place, which is why we hate it. Most of the 'getting you to share/like/retweet/+1/upvote' mechanisms are really ways to evade our advert blocking software, and advert ignoring wetware. We are far more susceptible to being influenced on something if it's our friends telling us about it, rather than some empty suit on TV.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:00:25 UTC 3 years ago

Yup.

groblek

November 12 2013, 21:40:51 UTC 3 years ago

I agree with the dislike of exhortations to share/like/retweet/whatever. It's obnoxious, and the signal to noise ratio is leaning heavily towards noise. I keep up with LJ better than any other social media simply because it has so much less noise - I've already written off facebook as impossible to keep up with, and I intentionally keep twitter pared down to a small group of people who generally amuse me. On the other hand, I was quite amused to see a paid ad for Parasite in my facebook feed in the weeks prior to the release - I think it may be the first time they've correctly identified my taste in anything.

And as an aside, I enjoy the Pokemon tweets - if we owned the right device, I suspect Kay_gmd and I would be addicts by now. :)

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:00:47 UTC 3 years ago

Pokemon is love.

jenfullmoon

November 12 2013, 22:13:30 UTC 3 years ago

it seems ridiculous to me that everyone has to have an account on literally EVERY SINGLE SOCIAL MEDIA THING IN EXISTENCE, period. You can't read it all. I can't read it all. It's overwhelming even for those who like that shit (I don't). Ugh. It is drowning, I think.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:00:58 UTC 3 years ago

Agreed.

lassarina

November 13 2013, 02:58:09 UTC 3 years ago

Honestly, I find I only have the bandwidth for not-more-than-two social networks at a time; one of which is always LJ/Dreamwidth (they're a single category in my head), and the other varies. Seeing things repeated everywhere just drains my bandwidth further.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:01:12 UTC 3 years ago

I get that.

ironed_orchid

November 13 2013, 03:10:46 UTC 3 years ago

I think the thing that annoys me most is comparatively new social media telling me how to use the internet, like the facebook for android app telling me "are you sure you want to go out there to be the big scary internet?"

Every time I see stuff like that I am internally screaming "I HAVE BEEN ON THE INTERNET SINCE BEFORE YOU WERE A SINGLE LINE OF CODE!!!"

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:01:26 UTC 3 years ago

SERIOUSLY OMG.

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seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:01:42 UTC 3 years ago

Love, honey.

Love.

jealousofstars

November 15 2013, 07:27:33 UTC 3 years ago

I just want to say that because of your Tumblr posts about Pokemon, I went out and bought a Pokemon game for my 3DS (Pokemon White v.2). And I am having so much fun with it. I haven't played a Pokemon game since Gameboys were still a thing. lol

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:01:55 UTC 3 years ago

Awesome!

ALL HAIL POKEMON.

absintheforest

November 19 2013, 21:40:36 UTC 3 years ago

I often feel social media plays on our insecurities, making it possible for us to be abused by countless emails and dozens of ads inserted in our feeds. We're willing to put up with it because we're afraid to disappear. Have you ever tried to delete your Facebook account? The emails Facebook sends are downright disturbing, meant to produce guilt for "leaving" your friends and family members, complete with their pictures right in the email.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:02:12 UTC 3 years ago

I haven't tried yet, but that's horrifying.

muddlewait

December 14 2013, 22:11:34 UTC 3 years ago

Thank you for writing this. Knowing your reservations about the current state of social media makes me feel less awkward about my own.

I worry that people spend so much energy in these spaces trying to be heard that they don't have enough time to think about what they're saying, about what they're listening to, or about what they're actually *doing* rather than saying.

That aside, I really value your social media presence, especially your tumblr. Thanks for your judgement and effort in compiling it, and especially for continuing to listen to your audience as much and as thoughtfully as you do. I hope you never have to stop.

seanan_mcguire

December 15 2013, 19:02:24 UTC 3 years ago

<3