Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/AkoTT?wr=false
In both my professional and personal life, I take pride in being like a penguin. Through lurking on the occasionally educational app TikTok, I have learned that I, like the noble penguin, deepen my bonds with friends and colleagues through pebbling. On a David Attenborough level, pebbling is a gift-giving ritual where one bird brings pebbles to a mate to (hopefully) use as the cornerstone for building nests. It is a very romantic sentiment that stood no chance against being co-opted by TikTok-speak to explain why people can go days at a time without meaningful conversation but share memes, funny videos, or the dreaded news article just to show we’ve been thinking of someone. This brings me to my “old man yells at cloud” blog about how turned off I am by how I’m constantly pushed to connect when I don’t want to.
social media
Well there’s your problem! Honestly, other than Beehaw I don’t have any digital comms apart from texting, and none of my friends or family are here. It’s so much nicer than when I had Instagram, or even much further back, Facebook.
Same. I stopped using non-Beehaw social media at the end of last year and haven’t looked back. I barely respond to texts as well. My social battery is pretty weak these days and I can only take so much irl interaction.
I tried out bsky and I’m thinking about just deleting everything and closing it up. It’s made me more anxious and that’s about it. I’ve seen no real benefits from it.
Human beings are social creatures, and being able to connect with one another is one of the best parts about the internet. But the internet’s incessant need to streamline and optimize how I connect with friends by sending me notifications the moment they’re active on TikTok, posting new stories on Instagram, or liking the same video as me is has turned those real friendships into supervised ones and that fucking sucks.
This author is making a mountain out of a molehill. There are other ways to interact on social media that aren’t just sharing memes and posts (and I’m pretty sure you can pause suggested content on Instagram anyway). You can have an actual conversation with somebody, an algorithm can’t “beat you to it” or “rob you of the opportunity” or whatever.
Or just call them up and hang out with them in the meat space if you’re so concerned.
They’re not complaining about not being able to share memes in the way they want. They’re complaining that, in the example they shared, they didn’t choose to share the reel with their friend, instagram just automatically did it. And they couldn’t find a way to turn that feature off. Furthermore, there’s a certain anxiety that many people have bc of how immediate and constant social media is. Like how read receipts put you on a timer to respond bc if you don’t respond fast enough then people think you’re ignoring them. Or if they see you posting or like some posts and not theirs or not responding to them, then they might get upset with you. So it feels like you have to constantly manage all of your relationships all at once bc there’s constantly a spotlight on everything you do if you use social media to connect with your friends in any way. Like are there alternatives? Yeah, but unless you really limit your friend group, there’s gonna be people who prefer to contact you via social media. It’s hard to avoid completely
Me 20 years ago.
