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.

autographedcat

November 12 2013, 18:20:06 UTC 3 years ago

I have a personal policy that I will not reshare anything that says "Share if you agree", or even worse "I bet most of you won't share this, but the people who REALLY REALLY care will!" or the like.

I love my mother. I think children are awesome. I think cancer sucks. (Seriously. Fuck cancer). But sharing that doesn't convey any useful information, and I won't be press-ganged into doing it through some sort of passive-aggressive peer pressure.

soon_lee

November 12 2013, 19:24:16 UTC 3 years ago

Just reading the phrases "Share if you agree" and "I bet most of you won't share this, but the people who REALLY REALLY care will!" is making me twitch!

autographedcat

November 12 2013, 20:00:18 UTC 3 years ago

It made me twitch too, and I typed it.

I actually was blogging on the current state of social media just the other day. It's here if anyone's interested:

http://www.autographedcat.com/2013/11/06/me-im-a-part-of-your-circle-of-friends/

(My web host seems to be absurdly overloaded at the moment. Apologies in advance if it's slow to load.)

vixyish

November 13 2013, 01:29:33 UTC 3 years ago

Yes, this. All of this.

maladaptive

November 13 2013, 03:08:27 UTC 3 years ago

Tumblr is full of "I will judge you if you don't reblog this" or "EVERYONE should reblog this" type things, like the grandchild of chain emails. I don't reblog any of those (and if I do I strip out the judgy comment at the bottom) and they fill me with a weird rage. Do I really need a post that almost certainly doesn't say something besides "[your choice of ism] sucks"? No. I don't.