#93 Unsocial Media...

Jan 27, 2025

Remember back in the olden days?

Back when you didn’t have the internet in your pocket and Twitter and Facebook were just the futuristic dreams of Mark Zuckerberg and a group of guys at Odeo?

(You can look that up – Twitter was founded as an internal messaging tool similar to Slack. There’s a whole book about it called “Twitterville” – it’s a very interesting read. The link takes you to used copies at Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon. I’ll deny Jeff Bezos a profit whenever possible…)

I jumped onto Twitter pretty soon after it was founded because A) it was free B) it looked kind of cool and also represented a way to connect with other creative people and C) my husband had a newly launched comic strip, and we (along with the rest of the creative universe) were trying to help get the word out and attract an audience.

At first, it was quite useful and even fun. I found a bunch of interesting people to follow and some of them followed me back and sometimes we even had conversations.

I learned about things called hashtags (before twitter we called it the pound sign or the number sign if you can believe that) and also learned that you were not supposed to just broadcast your own thoughts and your own work but to also share the work and thoughts of other people.

There were, and this is important, no ads.

One reason for the absence of advertising was that businesses were slow to understand what this new thing was and what it could potentially do for them.

Well, as we all know, they soon found out.

Quicker than you could say “Can I interest you in this set of steak knives?” stuff started showing up in our Twitter feeds from accounts we were not following.

“Promoted Tweets” were not only appearing, they began to dominate.

Of course, Twitter wanted money from all of us now. So they also started reaching out to creators and small businesses to get us to pay for “promoted tweets”.

I suppose that was a natural progression. I mean there’s no such thing as a free lunch is there? And if the Twitter folks wanted to capitalize on their invention, well, that’s just capitalism, right?

But then things got creepy.

And Orwellian.

And Twitter seemed to start knowing things about us.

And showing us “targeted” content. (A fancy harmless sounding way of trying to get us to think this was a good thing.)

I turned my attention to…

You guessed it.

Facebook.

I joined Facebook very very very reluctantly. Probably about six years after joining Twitter.

By now I had a decent following on Twitter but it didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. And the syndicate had made it clear that they only handled marketing the comic strip to newspapers and that this new thing called “social media” was up to us to manage.

A few cartooning friends extolled the virtues of Facebook, they said they were building audiences big time there.

Like Twitter, it was free. (I do like free.)

But the real reason I signed up was that my extended family made it quite clear that they were not interested in keeping in touch with me any other way. They were not phone call or email people. Whenever I asked for their email addresses they said “I never check my emails – just find me on Facebook.”

So find them on Facebook I did.

Along with a few hundred friends and old classmates.

And, mostly, I looked at the photos of their lives. Pics of their kids, their new houses, their pets, their meals (I admit I am one of those folks guilty of photographing particularly good food and sharing it on my socials) and their vacations.

And something started to happen to me.

I started to feel quite envious and depressed.

Not only did everybody else’s lives look so much more interesting than mine, they all seemed to be doing things I could not afford to do.

Or didn’t have the time to do.

I sat myself down.

After a good talking to, I realized that, back before social media, I was able to wake up every morning blissfully ignorant of other people’s lives.

In a good way.

Facebook has now been around long enough that I have learned some home truths since those early days.

First, you are only seeing what people want to show you. Folks are not posting about their messy divorce or their struggles with addiction. (Well, some people are, but that’s a whole different post.)

Second, when you see an account with thousands of followers, a great many of those followers might be bots. They might even be bots the person paid for to inflate the sense of their success.

Third, it really is true that when a service is free the product is you.

Which takes us right back to that Twitter thing with the creepy way these platforms data mine us and try to sell us stuff.

And worse, to move beyond selling us stuff to stoking our political differences.

I wrote this back in 2018. BEFORE people started actually running around the country with torches and gathering in ugly mobs.

It hasn’t aged well.

Twitter has gotten particularly ugly. My feeds used to be all about comics and poetry and science. Now they are nothing but what I call “chicken little the sky is falling” and politics. And actual hate speech. I haven’t posted there in ages.

I don’t post on Facebook very much anymore either. I have seriously flirted with the idea of leaving completely.

But there’s still that issue with those family members. If I leave Facebook I am pretty sure I will be severing ties.

I’m not ready to go there yet.

But I’m getting close.

Where I Am. Sort Of…

I do still have accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook for the time being. So if you want to find me there you can.

I have old Tumblr accounts that I have not deactivated (remember when Tumblr was setting the world on fire?) but I never, and I mean never, go there or post there. I mostly have not gotten rid of it in case the platform suddenly becomes “the place to be” - as unlikely a possibility as that seems.

Currently I am most active on Bluesky and Substack.

Of the two, I feel most engaged on Substack. People who find me here actually read my content which helps us have an actual engaged relationship. Something I’ve seldom found on my other socials.

In the 18 or so years that I’ve been navigating social media this is the place that finally feels like home.

Thank you for being a big part of that!

Fear Of Missing Out

She believes there is something exciting happening on the other side of this door.

There isn’t.

Books

If you like my work there are two book collections for sale.

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Note: Recently I’ve had a few issues with book orders. My store is fairly aggressive with flagging fraudulent activity so if your mailing address does not match the address on your credit card account you can expect a message or email from me before I can ship to you. The store does not let me process an order and collect payment until these issues are resolved.

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This button will take you to my PayPal tip jar. It is tied to my old Typepad “Anne And God” page (look for the button in the left hand sidebar) because I cannot use the Substack tip jar.

Substack only has a relationship with Stripe as a payment gateway and I recently had to close my Stripe account after they failed to adequately protect me from credit card fraud generated by identity thieves in Australia (a whole long story) so I have to do things in this roundabout way.

Thank you for reading and for your support.

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I appreciate the feedback and knowing how often I have struck a chord with your lives.

Anne The Passive Aggressive Poet

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