![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeToday's entry (as opposed to the one before, which was technically yesterday's), is on a topic chosen by the lovely and talented ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
elanya, buccaneer expert extraordinaire. She wanted to know about my social media usage.
I'm on yet another airplane right now, and since I've been doing a fair bit of communicating from various airports, it seems particularly apt that I should be writing about it now.
I was looking through my old LiveJournal entries the other day, looking for a post I had written a few years ago, and came across an entry from 2009 in which I railed against Twitter and declared my undying enmity for it. How could one encapsulate one's thoughts in less than 140 characters? Faugh!
Ah, how times have changed.
My first true encounter with social media was LiveJournal, back in 2002. I was given an activation code bycurtana, if memory serves, and less than a year later I bought a permanent account with $100 that I couldn't really spare at the time, but which I spent anyway. I sent it as a cheque to brad's mother, which should tell you something about the Stone Age of Internet in which we were living back then. ;) Getting a permanent account meant that I got upgraded to the "fast servers" on LJ, too, which was a great privilege at the time.
LiveJournal has remained the platform to which I return, over and over. I created a couple of accounts other than this, first for my creative writing (in 2004, if memory serves) and then for my fanfiction in particular (this was in late 2009) when I was still a little squeamish about outing myself as being in fandom. Yet again, that has changed a lot. Apparently I no longer care if people know all about the depraved stuff I write and post online. ;) Even though a few years went by in which I rarely posted to LJ, I don't think more than a week or so has gone by in which I haven't checked my friends page to see what people were up to. LJ allows me to check in with my friends in a detailed fashion that other, more modern social media platforms don't allow for. LiveJournal has always been a place for more intimate details, especially since made up handles and extensive privacy settings allow for a pretty high level of anonymity, should one desire it. LiveJournal has always had these "safe spaces" for people who needed them, and it serves a very valuable purpose.
I have been using Facebook more of late. I've had a Facebook account for several years, but it was mostly dormant until last year. Partly I started using it more becausepdaughter was using it more, and partly because a few other friends were very active on there but not on other sites. Facebook is sort of a necessary evil, as far as I'm concerned. It's useful in some ways, but it also makes me feel incredibly lazy, because of the whole "like" and "share" features. It's no longer necessary to actively seek out things to post, all I have to do is go through my "feed" (and I sort of hate that word), and content will be supplied! Furthermore, I follow and am followed by friends, family and also coworkers, and so I am much more careful about what sort of personal information gets posted there.
I'm also not a big fan of the way Facebook is increasingly monitoring and "adapting" the content I see. I understand the rationale behind it, trying to make the content more targeted and what have you, but it not only always feels like an unwanted invasion of my life, but Facebook has not to this day ever figured out what is truly important to me. So I spend a lot of time fighting with my Facebook page so that I'll see my friends' updates and not some stupid sponsored post, or a post on which seventy million people have commented just because it's popular. I know that I'm not alone in my dislike of these features, but we seem to be stuck with them, at least until we find a better way to stay in touch. I am not enough of a rebel to forgo staying in touch with my friends, at least for now.
My most recent discovery on social media is Tumbr. Tumblr at once fascinates me and frustrates me, because I want it to be more than what it is. I am, as I stated above, an old-school LiveJournal user, and as such I am accustomed to having actual conversations online, in the form of nested comments. On Tumblr, the reblog function has replaced nested comments, and it makes me want to rip out my hair, because how on Earth am I supposed to have a proper discussion this way? Of course the answer is: I'm not. Tumblr, I have learned, is basically great for discovering really pretty images, and then re-posting them for other people to see. It's a platform aimed at teenagers, much the same way that LiveJournal was aimed at teenagers ten or twelve years ago. I was in my early twenties when I started on LJ, but the majority of users then were in their teens, and it's the same way now with Tumblr. There's a whole new etiquette to be learned on that site (again, the same way we all learned netiquette when we started using LJ), and transgressing all those unwritten rules has some pretty dire social consequences if you're not careful. Mob rule is the same there as it is on any other social media platform that allows for anonymity, and it's pretty easy to find yourself at the center of a firestorm of harassment and hateful messages.
My own usage of Tumblr is predominantly focused on reblogging amusing fandom things, and what has come to be known as Social Justice. I'm not sure if that was a common term before I encountered Tumblr, but that's where I started seeing it used the most. There's actually quite a lot of very useful and insightful information to be found on Tumblr, if you take the time to look, or at least take the time to follow people who pay attention to that sort of thing. A little like Facebook, if you follow enough people, eventually the interesting stuff gets reblogged to your "dashboard."
Of course, I can't let a post about social media go by without talking about Twitter. Ah, Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2010, because of the Supernatural fandom. See, Misha Collins is on Twitter, and at the time he was posting zany things and generally being pretty cool, so I finally caved and decided to see what the fuss was about. Since it was fandom-inspired, I used my fandom handle to sign up, and that's when the line between my real life and my fandom life first began to blur. Many of my RL friends were already on Twitter, and since we were all less active on LJ, it only seemed logical to start following them there so I could keep up with what they were doing.
Of course, I was also moderately popular in fandom as well, so I soon had more followers than I honestly knew what to do with. I know that for most people 400+ followers isn't all that much (I think Lady Gaga has several million), but for me it's pretty overwhelming, and my follow list is a fraction of that. I can barely keep up with my Twitter timeline as it is. Keeping up is not an accurate description, either. Twitter taught me that there is no way on God's green earth to read all the tweets on my timeline. In a way, it has taught me to be more Zen, to let go of the need to know everything that's happened. Back when LJ was more active, if I missed several days of checking in I'd often have to read back nearly a hundred entries. Now, if I miss even a day on Twitter, I will literally miss thousands of tweets, and it took me a while to work out that that was okay. Everyone misses thousands of tweets every hour of every day, and it's just not that important, in the grand scheme of things. There will always be more tweets, and the important information will find its way to you eventually.
These days my Twitter is not even all that fandom-oriented. I do tweet about fannish things, but I don't follow many of the actors/writers/producers that I used to. I stopped following Misha because at one point he got offensive by my standards and I couldn't bring myself to keep reading his tweets. He's since gotten better, but I haven't bothered following him again. I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends I otherwise don't get to see, and also as a Social Justice Platform, maybe even moreso than Tumblr.
It's taken a few years for me to work out the logistics of using popular hashtags, but I've learned that social media activism can significantly impact society. If you'd told me this a few years ago I would have scoffed, but it's true nonetheless. Twitter and Tumblr in particular are giving a voice to minorities and marginalized groups who otherwise go underrepresented in society, and it's been a very enlightening experience. I participated, albeit only peripherally, in the great LiveJournal debate known as Racefail 2009. At the time I was only beginning to scratch the surface of what "privilege" meant, and I got extremely lucky, because someone was willing to explain it to me in terms that I understood, when they really didn't have to. In fact, they might just as easily have gotten angry with me, and they would have been perfectly within their rights. Instead, though, I was afforded the opportunity to take a good look at myself, my own assumptions, my own prejudices, and I learned a great deal from the experience. The biggest lesson I learned was "Check your privilege." If my knee-jerk reaction to something is to become defensive, then I need to examine why that is, and see if there's no underlying privilege there that I'm trying to preserve, rather than be open-minded and inclusive.
Therefore, these days when I see an activist hashtag, I usually make a point of reading as many of the tweets as I can. Sometimes the hashtag is so busy that I can' t keep up. When I feel I can contribute to the hashtag I do so, but more often than not I simply try to step aside and let those who would normally have no voice get to have their say. I retweet a lot of what others have to say, because the more visibility they have, the better. In this sense, having a good number of followers is really useful, because it's 400+ people who might not otherwise be reading what others have to say.
I think that might be what I like the most about Twitter. It's a great equalizer, in that it doesn't matter who you are, whether you're a celebrity or a politician or a regular citizen, you have a good chance of getting heard thanks to the mechanics of the platform.
So that's my social media usage in a nutshell. If after all this you actually want to follow me anywhere that's not LJ, you can usually find me under the name ratherastory. Be warned that a lot of my Tumblr and Twitter content is me rambling on at length about fandom things, social justice, and a constant stream of pictures of my pets (though I guess for now it'll only be pictures of the dog). For Facebook (which I don't recommend), you'll have to PM me, because I don't think posting my full name online in a public place is a good idea.
Thanks for sticking with me this far! Stay tuned for my next post, in which I shall be talking about fantasy books!
elanya, buccaneer expert extraordinaire. She wanted to know about my social media usage.I'm on yet another airplane right now, and since I've been doing a fair bit of communicating from various airports, it seems particularly apt that I should be writing about it now.
I was looking through my old LiveJournal entries the other day, looking for a post I had written a few years ago, and came across an entry from 2009 in which I railed against Twitter and declared my undying enmity for it. How could one encapsulate one's thoughts in less than 140 characters? Faugh!
Ah, how times have changed.
My first true encounter with social media was LiveJournal, back in 2002. I was given an activation code by
curtana, if memory serves, and less than a year later I bought a permanent account with $100 that I couldn't really spare at the time, but which I spent anyway. I sent it as a cheque to brad's mother, which should tell you something about the Stone Age of Internet in which we were living back then. ;) Getting a permanent account meant that I got upgraded to the "fast servers" on LJ, too, which was a great privilege at the time.LiveJournal has remained the platform to which I return, over and over. I created a couple of accounts other than this, first for my creative writing (in 2004, if memory serves) and then for my fanfiction in particular (this was in late 2009) when I was still a little squeamish about outing myself as being in fandom. Yet again, that has changed a lot. Apparently I no longer care if people know all about the depraved stuff I write and post online. ;) Even though a few years went by in which I rarely posted to LJ, I don't think more than a week or so has gone by in which I haven't checked my friends page to see what people were up to. LJ allows me to check in with my friends in a detailed fashion that other, more modern social media platforms don't allow for. LiveJournal has always been a place for more intimate details, especially since made up handles and extensive privacy settings allow for a pretty high level of anonymity, should one desire it. LiveJournal has always had these "safe spaces" for people who needed them, and it serves a very valuable purpose.
I have been using Facebook more of late. I've had a Facebook account for several years, but it was mostly dormant until last year. Partly I started using it more because
pdaughter was using it more, and partly because a few other friends were very active on there but not on other sites. Facebook is sort of a necessary evil, as far as I'm concerned. It's useful in some ways, but it also makes me feel incredibly lazy, because of the whole "like" and "share" features. It's no longer necessary to actively seek out things to post, all I have to do is go through my "feed" (and I sort of hate that word), and content will be supplied! Furthermore, I follow and am followed by friends, family and also coworkers, and so I am much more careful about what sort of personal information gets posted there.I'm also not a big fan of the way Facebook is increasingly monitoring and "adapting" the content I see. I understand the rationale behind it, trying to make the content more targeted and what have you, but it not only always feels like an unwanted invasion of my life, but Facebook has not to this day ever figured out what is truly important to me. So I spend a lot of time fighting with my Facebook page so that I'll see my friends' updates and not some stupid sponsored post, or a post on which seventy million people have commented just because it's popular. I know that I'm not alone in my dislike of these features, but we seem to be stuck with them, at least until we find a better way to stay in touch. I am not enough of a rebel to forgo staying in touch with my friends, at least for now.
My most recent discovery on social media is Tumbr. Tumblr at once fascinates me and frustrates me, because I want it to be more than what it is. I am, as I stated above, an old-school LiveJournal user, and as such I am accustomed to having actual conversations online, in the form of nested comments. On Tumblr, the reblog function has replaced nested comments, and it makes me want to rip out my hair, because how on Earth am I supposed to have a proper discussion this way? Of course the answer is: I'm not. Tumblr, I have learned, is basically great for discovering really pretty images, and then re-posting them for other people to see. It's a platform aimed at teenagers, much the same way that LiveJournal was aimed at teenagers ten or twelve years ago. I was in my early twenties when I started on LJ, but the majority of users then were in their teens, and it's the same way now with Tumblr. There's a whole new etiquette to be learned on that site (again, the same way we all learned netiquette when we started using LJ), and transgressing all those unwritten rules has some pretty dire social consequences if you're not careful. Mob rule is the same there as it is on any other social media platform that allows for anonymity, and it's pretty easy to find yourself at the center of a firestorm of harassment and hateful messages.
My own usage of Tumblr is predominantly focused on reblogging amusing fandom things, and what has come to be known as Social Justice. I'm not sure if that was a common term before I encountered Tumblr, but that's where I started seeing it used the most. There's actually quite a lot of very useful and insightful information to be found on Tumblr, if you take the time to look, or at least take the time to follow people who pay attention to that sort of thing. A little like Facebook, if you follow enough people, eventually the interesting stuff gets reblogged to your "dashboard."
Of course, I can't let a post about social media go by without talking about Twitter. Ah, Twitter. I joined Twitter in 2010, because of the Supernatural fandom. See, Misha Collins is on Twitter, and at the time he was posting zany things and generally being pretty cool, so I finally caved and decided to see what the fuss was about. Since it was fandom-inspired, I used my fandom handle to sign up, and that's when the line between my real life and my fandom life first began to blur. Many of my RL friends were already on Twitter, and since we were all less active on LJ, it only seemed logical to start following them there so I could keep up with what they were doing.
Of course, I was also moderately popular in fandom as well, so I soon had more followers than I honestly knew what to do with. I know that for most people 400+ followers isn't all that much (I think Lady Gaga has several million), but for me it's pretty overwhelming, and my follow list is a fraction of that. I can barely keep up with my Twitter timeline as it is. Keeping up is not an accurate description, either. Twitter taught me that there is no way on God's green earth to read all the tweets on my timeline. In a way, it has taught me to be more Zen, to let go of the need to know everything that's happened. Back when LJ was more active, if I missed several days of checking in I'd often have to read back nearly a hundred entries. Now, if I miss even a day on Twitter, I will literally miss thousands of tweets, and it took me a while to work out that that was okay. Everyone misses thousands of tweets every hour of every day, and it's just not that important, in the grand scheme of things. There will always be more tweets, and the important information will find its way to you eventually.
These days my Twitter is not even all that fandom-oriented. I do tweet about fannish things, but I don't follow many of the actors/writers/producers that I used to. I stopped following Misha because at one point he got offensive by my standards and I couldn't bring myself to keep reading his tweets. He's since gotten better, but I haven't bothered following him again. I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends I otherwise don't get to see, and also as a Social Justice Platform, maybe even moreso than Tumblr.
It's taken a few years for me to work out the logistics of using popular hashtags, but I've learned that social media activism can significantly impact society. If you'd told me this a few years ago I would have scoffed, but it's true nonetheless. Twitter and Tumblr in particular are giving a voice to minorities and marginalized groups who otherwise go underrepresented in society, and it's been a very enlightening experience. I participated, albeit only peripherally, in the great LiveJournal debate known as Racefail 2009. At the time I was only beginning to scratch the surface of what "privilege" meant, and I got extremely lucky, because someone was willing to explain it to me in terms that I understood, when they really didn't have to. In fact, they might just as easily have gotten angry with me, and they would have been perfectly within their rights. Instead, though, I was afforded the opportunity to take a good look at myself, my own assumptions, my own prejudices, and I learned a great deal from the experience. The biggest lesson I learned was "Check your privilege." If my knee-jerk reaction to something is to become defensive, then I need to examine why that is, and see if there's no underlying privilege there that I'm trying to preserve, rather than be open-minded and inclusive.
Therefore, these days when I see an activist hashtag, I usually make a point of reading as many of the tweets as I can. Sometimes the hashtag is so busy that I can' t keep up. When I feel I can contribute to the hashtag I do so, but more often than not I simply try to step aside and let those who would normally have no voice get to have their say. I retweet a lot of what others have to say, because the more visibility they have, the better. In this sense, having a good number of followers is really useful, because it's 400+ people who might not otherwise be reading what others have to say.
I think that might be what I like the most about Twitter. It's a great equalizer, in that it doesn't matter who you are, whether you're a celebrity or a politician or a regular citizen, you have a good chance of getting heard thanks to the mechanics of the platform.
So that's my social media usage in a nutshell. If after all this you actually want to follow me anywhere that's not LJ, you can usually find me under the name ratherastory. Be warned that a lot of my Tumblr and Twitter content is me rambling on at length about fandom things, social justice, and a constant stream of pictures of my pets (though I guess for now it'll only be pictures of the dog). For Facebook (which I don't recommend), you'll have to PM me, because I don't think posting my full name online in a public place is a good idea.
Thanks for sticking with me this far! Stay tuned for my next post, in which I shall be talking about fantasy books!
