social spider mans
The biggest culture shock when I came to New Zealand, and back into the Western World(tm), wasn’t the food or the extreme avarice toward collective thinking, it was that people still use Facebook in earnest.
I’d deliberately exited social media years before, made easier by moving to Korea, where people weren’t using the same platforms as the U.S. anyway. It never really came back into my life, but I keep feeling like maybe I should “speak” social media, like it would add some value to my knowledge of our own culture or help me bond with coworkers. At the same time, I hated my time on social media. It always felt like a waste. Getting back on that train isn’t possible anymore for me.
I’ve made a few attempts anyway. Mastodon was fine but I never remembered to log in, the friction was too high. Bluesky had a waitlist, and by the time I could have joined I realized I never used Twitter to begin with, so short-form posting wasn’t something I had any interest in. Tumblr I tried to return to, but it had passed me by completely. Too many in-jokes, too many fandoms all of which I don’t belong to.
The only places that still make sense to me are Tildes and personal homepages. Tildes resembles a simple BBS board, strictly text based, run by one opinionated person, small and invite-only in a way that keeps it focused on actual discussion and being curious and civil. And then personal homepages just feel like seeing into a person. What they value shows up in the choices they make: whether they go simple and fast or heavy and interactive, whether there are a lot of gifs, whether they’re using old table layouts. There’s an intentionality to it that a profile on a platform just doesn’t have.
I do still use YouTube, but I’ve blocked the social parts and the shorts, so my only interaction is with the creator by watching the video, which is pretty one sided.
When people bring up TikTok or Instagram or, most commonly, Facebook, I’ll just need to accept that I’m not going to connect with whatever point they want to share with me. I’ll either give them a blank stare or pretend to laugh along as I confusedly search knowyourmeme.