Woven Threads: The Unreality of Social Media

Woven Threads is a series of blog posts where I compile and expand on tweets and threads I’ve posted on Twitter. They may cover a number of topics that I often ruminate on. 

Being born in the 90s, I grew up in that strange narrow slice of time where the internet had gained popularity but social media hadn’t come into existence yet. We had Google and Wikipedia to meet our research needs (much to our teachers chagrin), Miniclips and eBaum’s World for flash games and cheeky videos, YouTube had introduced the word “vlog” into our vocabulary, and entire communities existed on Neopets and FictionPress and Quizilla. Facebook existed but nobody really knew what to use it for. 

The internet was a valuable resource, but I'm glad I grew up with that physical distinction between fantasy and reality before social media. I think it really blurred the line between fantasy and reality in a way that no other medium has before. Even with TV, there is a sense of distance, disconnection. It's a little play put on by little people in a little box with regular intermissions to blare advertisements that are never the same volume as the program. 

Social media feels intimately close. You're peeking through a little window into someone's real life, sometimes in real time. For some folks, that's entirely accurate. But for a lot of people, it's just as scripted and directed and edited (and even fictionalized!) as any other medium.

I think it's why it's easier for me to relate to older folks than younger ones these days. I can't identify with youth because I can't even fathom how they conceive of the world and reality. I’ve seen kids instantly and naturally pick up the speech patterns of vloggers and TikTokkers, something that still feels like a performance to me.

I've said to myself, "that just happens in books/movies/TV shows" countless times, but how do you say that about social media without falling into the trap of forgetting that the people you interact with online are real people? No matter how curated their feeds are, they're still real people who receive our engagement in real time.

There are no publicists or managers (for most of us) to parse through feedback in the forms of comments and DMs and quote tweets and tags to weed out the trolls and haters before handing it off to you. If we’re lucky, moderators and algorithms filter and hide them from us before we can see them, but usually—especially when you’re marginalized—you have to report them and block or mute or delete yourself. Regardless of what you think of your mental stamina, that takes a toll.

What’s worse is that people have more expectations of immediate and constant availability and response instead of unattainability. Not just in our personal lives, but of our heroes and idols and the people we hate too. 

I grew up believing that I'd never actually get the opportunity to directly interact with my idols. Now I can DM them privately and unless they do have a PR team, there's a good chance they might actually see it, even if they don't respond.

I can post about someone, not tag them or message them, but they can still find it and read it and I may not ever even know. If you aren't constantly cognizant of that, you can cause some real damage without ever even realizing it.

You used to only have to care about reporters and, aside from tabloids, most of them have to abide by a set of ethics and standards (which, admittedly, in the past were mostly problematic). Now it's a free for all. You don't even have to pay for postage to send hate mail now.

Though, that’s not to say that I don’t love digital and social media. They’re not as established as media like film and TV, and definitely not so established to nearly antiquate itself like print. And while they may not have reached the “artistic” status like painting or sculpture, they are still arts media all the same. We're still at a stage where we can make them however we want. 

Some of those older media has been going through refining processes for hundreds of years now. But this newer media—which here includes TV and film—well, we're still learning what we can do with it, all the different ways we can use them to tell stories. We're still experimenting on industry levels.

We need to stop thinking of these industries as established and immutable. Technology changes, our values change, and so should our media and arts. Even older media has adapted to the resources made available and cultural changes that have happened. I mean, podcasts are an adaptation of radio shows and plays; we have eBooks and audiobooks; we can binge watch entire seasons of a TV show on the nights they release thanks to streaming networks.

If the practices aren't working for us, we can change them, build something completely new.

These digital spaces are just tools. This is why, though it might make things difficult for a while, I don’t fear the downfall of Twitter. It’s a space that was whatever you made it. It may help connect us but it didn't create community. All it does is demonstrate the breadth of human experience. These perspectives exist elsewhere. 

It’s why I get frustrated when I see people say that Twitter is “the only space” for any group. If you're only connected to those communities and these perspectives on Twitter, you're actually still missing out. There are so many of us who aren't there in the first place. In fact, most of my community isn't there.

A lot of you don't actually know who's organizing and doing the work in other spaces because you didn't bother to look until Twitter told you we existed. Most people don't find me through Twitter, they find me through my work. 

And Twitter has done as much harm as good. It proliferated misinformation, emboldened bigots, and gave power to some pretty terrible people. And truthfully what we give it credit for is actually the work of the internet and its users. Most of us exist on multiple platforms. We cross post all the time. I found my community on FB, IG, TikTok, through mutual connections. Twitter could disappear, but we'd all still exist.

That's the beauty of community. We always find ways to bring each other together. The "sides" of Twitter exist because of community organizers and educators curating information for your timeline. We cycle through these sites all the time. And before social media we did email blasts and telephone trees. 

This is what happens when we lose touch with history. This was an evolution of an existing structure. Another evolution will come along. We just have to pay attention to what connects us and what disconnects us. Keep the process, change the tools.