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

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).