I’ve been trying to get to grips with social media, and I know that makes me sound somewhat older than I am, but bear with.
When I was about 10 (I think) I got my first phone. Said phone was small and orange, and I decorated it with nail varnish, and I don’t think it had snake because it wasn’t a nokia, but it had some snake-like game. I could text fairly quickly, mostly used full words, and only used one hand (because my phone was tiny, and who is using two thumbs to type, really).
A few years later Facebook blew up in the UK, and I refused to buy in at first because I had Bebo, which seemed to basically do the same thing, and MySpace, because I was alternative. Also, Facebook wanted you to say which university you were at, and I was 15 and therefore not at university.
Of course, it didn’t exactly take long for me to succumb, just like the rest of the “youth”. I wasn’t so easily lulled into Twitter, I only got that once I started working for a digital development company (where a colleague suggested I’d get sacked for not having it). This came about the same time as my first smartphone, and really I think it’s just spiraled from there.
Not badly spiraled. I haven’t tried all of the different forms of social media, of which there are now MANY. But if you wanted you could find me on twitter, possibly YouTube (not that I make my own videos), instagram, and snapchat.
Instagram I love, because it has enabled me to become a minorly less terrible photographer than I once was. I’ve never been good at photos, as this blog will attest because I have hardly any of Morocco or Spain. If only I’d had instagram with it’s various make-it-look-better settings, and the ability to pretend that strangers might be interested in the quirky (“quirky“) things I capture. It romanticises my terrible photographs further than I could have hoped or dreamed. I even take pictures of myself, though as far as I’m concerned the art of the selfie is for wizards with extending arms and an unnatural understanding of light.
Facebook is a bit creepy in all honesty. I think because I don’t really use it to communicate except by private message (which might as well be text), I just see other people’s lives pass by, and occasionally I get in someone else’s life and they acknowledge it on the internet through the wonder of tagging. My entire history feels so well catalogued now, in an incredibly imbalanced way.
Twitter catalogues the unbalanced side of my history, I feel. There’s a definite art to putting your thoughts into words, let alone a limited set, and so it really shines through what you considered to be important to share with the world in that second. Or, what you needed to get out of your head before it exploded. Or, how unfunny you are. Really any of the above. It’s also not very cool any more, which is fine because it’s full of shouting older people who think they’ve won the internet by tweeting, and I LOVE them.
YouTube and Snapchat are both a bit of a mystery to me. I ‘get’ how vlogs work, I just would never willingly film myself and then let other people see. It is totally great for learning how makeup works, however. Disappearing content I’m still getting my head round, but I do think I see the appeal – looking back over some of my social media history there are things I’d like to just vanish, but I don’t think I’m totally on board with actually making content designed not to last.
You know, because I write a blog.
Blogging feels like something quite other than social media. It’s something more outward than journalling, there is an implication of involving other people, but it’s also very private. There are drafts of posts on here which I’ll never finish, and some which I’ll never start. There are views I’ve shared which I’d probably entirely go back on now, but I shared them for a reason at the time, so committed to the page they stay. I think blogging is my favourite social media because really it’s quite anti-social, but it’s still inclusive.
So I guess what I’m saying is, thanks for joining me.
