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.