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

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.