9/20/2021 - Social Media Sucks Ass Vol. 1
(Webmasters note: While this can apply to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and literally any social media platform, those three especially. I mainly have Twitter in mind here as I dump my thoughts and ramblings since it is the one I'm on now. I have long abandoned Instagram and Facebook.)
I can have incredibly complex feelings about social media. On one hand, I have met many wonderful people through it, but on the other hand social media has fucked up the web in countless ways, and it has negatively affected me in several ways too. I will be discussing them today in this post, as well as other ramblings about social media and my feelings about it.
When it comes to it, despite the good social media has done for me, mainly that I have made wonderful connections through it, I still absolutely fucking hate it.
(The anime is Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, one of my favorites.)
Social media has negatively affected us all I feel. We all have developed unrealistic expectations for ourselves and our lives because of it. And while I, and many others do know this, it can still be incredibly difficult to unlearn these thoughts and internalize the knowledge we have about social media and how it has hurt us, in different ways for everyone too. It is a constant, ongoing and rather difficult effort to do this. Especially if you have used social media for some time. The hurt social media does while there can be overlaps for everyone, especially even in groups like creatives of all sorts as one example I am deeply familiar with and knowledgeable of since I am one myself, it can still manifest differently in people.
In this post I will be discussing how social media has hurt myself personally. I encourage you to make your own blog post, or even a private one document yourself if you'd like and want to dump your feelings about it. It can be rather cathartic. It was for me when I made this.
As one example, and the one that has really been in my mind this year has to be how social media makes me feel deeply guilty that I can be slow to finish a show. I have always been like this, always, even when I was a kid with more focus, and free time. This was never a concern of mine until I started really using social media in high school.
As a kid I would take forever to finish shows, it was a bit different then because I was watching anime a lot. But I would hop from show to show constantly because that's neurodivergence for you. Some shows also as a kid I loved were not fully fansubbed too. Or all up on YouTube in three parts. And I didn't know about pirating. and a lot of the shady illegal streaming sites that are around today didn't really have as many in existence as they did then. They were around but nowhere near in numbers as today.
So even if I wanted to finish a show, if it wasn't fully fansubbed I would have no way of doing so until it was fully fansubbed. This was before Crunchyroll and legal streaming and simulcasts became a thing. If you wanted to see a full anime without piracy, be prepared to shell out the dough for a multiple DVD set of a show, with 3-5 max episodes on each disc all having a retail price of 40+ USD. So many people, mainly people younger than me, do not fully realize how good we have it today with Blu-ray, SD Blu-ray sets, and even more recent DVD sets and of course streaming. Owning and seeing anime is more accessible and affordable than it has ever been before.
Before I really used social media, I didn't care how long I took to finish a show. Now with the advent of binge culture, and how I constantly see people talking about how they marathon and binge shows, I feel extreme guilt on a near daily basis. While I can marathon/binge a show very quickly, it is a rare occurrence, always has been. And it happens completely at random. I am still shocked how I was able to binge so many Leiji Matsumoto anime in the summer when I first got into his work. I also watched the original Gundam and Aura battler dunbine in about a week and a half for each of them back in 2019. Those are the most current times I marathoned a whole show like that.
Social media makes me forget this too: that everyone is completely different. Regardless of who you are, either you be neurodivergent or neurotypical, everyone has different paces and habits. And it can especially vary with neurodivergent people. Some can marathon a show fast, others can be slower, it truly is case by case for everyone and social media and binge culture has made me forget this. It makes me ashamed that I have focus issues that I have trouble controlling, and no matter how invested I am in a show or any form of media, I cannot always retain focus.
It makes me feel pathetic, and like a fake fan too? It makes me ashamed of how my brain is, it doesn't help how my focus has been hindered more over the past few years and especially during this pandemic, since I am in survival mode 24/7. And I deeply resent social media for that. This used to NEVER be a problem for me until I started using it.
Social media also has hurt me as an artist. There are countless posts by artists of all kinds, of all skill levels, from professional to student to hobbyist, social media has hurt every artist, and every creative of any kind in various ways. We tie engagement to our self worth. We can get easily discouraged when seeing other people's art. We can bump into random assholes who can be rude for an array of reasons, either it be mean comments about your art(while constructive criticism is good, there is massive difference between that and being a bag of dicks) your commission prices, to literally ANYTHING. I don't know why people think that because they are behind a screen, and can even be oceans away from someone, just not be in the same room as someone else, they feel they can say the shit they say.
I swear too many of y'all say things online you wouldn't be caught dead saying irl. And some things that are just terminally online too, and above all else: cruel.
I honestly could go off about how social media sucks forever, and I'll probably make a part two about this sometime because I do not want to make this post ridiculously long. What I have to say about my feelings for social media warrant multiple blog posts. So I will make more going along into the future. I will most likely make a post dedicated to just how it harms creatives since I am intimately familiar with how it hurts them since I am one myself.
I've been using it a lot less lately, and curating my feed more and just blocking and muting what I don't wanna see. I swear if you just curate your online experience, just block/mute what you don't wanna see, and be respectful to people, your online experience will be so much better. Social media is hell. Make it as less of hell as you can for yourself however and as much as you possibly can.
This is what I've just been focusing on, especially this and last year. Shit has been absolute utter hell for me in the real world. So I'm working on trying to have as much as a refuge I can when I'm online. I've got enough going on irl, so I work at making my online experience just talking with cool people I've met, seeing cool art, and lots of bunny pictures.
I've got a very limited amount of spoons so I'm working at taking care of myself how I can. You should too.
Despite the good that it's done for me, and the incredible people I've met from it, hell I've met many of my closest friends through it, truly wonderful and amazing people I am grateful to call my friends. I still fucking despise social media. I will still use it, albeit much less than how I was as a teenager. But I wouldn't be shocked if at some point down the line I have to abandon it for whatever reason.
Fuck Social Media. Especially Twitter. We all should abandon Twitter and social media as a whole and make neocities websites. I'm glad I've been doing that this year. As stated earlier, I have so many feelings about social media that warrant more than one post, and I dont want this one to be astronomically long. So there will be more posts about my feelings down the line. They will come whenever they are made in the future down the line.
Take care of yourselves y'all. Do you what you need to do to take care of yourselves and put your wellbeing first. Always.
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