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21 November 2021 21:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
haptalaonYou know, I feel like I half-write then delete this post every month, so if you've seen me actually get around to posting it then I'm sorry...
But I hate how the two personae which get you follows on social media are 1. posting bold, slightly combatative statements on the discourse of the day, or 2. vastly overstating your personal magical competence while trying to sell things.
Folk tell me that social media is a "real place" where you can "meet" people; but it's set up to reward certain kinds of behaviour, and because that reward is so specific, it turns into performing behaviour. It's actually pretty hard to find people on twitter, say, who are just...sharing what they do, without grandstanding; who give off the energy of the person you happen to be sat next to at a moot, and get chatting to.
It's such a bad environment of gathering a group of your peers, who you can mutually support on a peer-to-peer basis, & it makes me feel like I'm hanging out in a shopping mall where everyone's pretending to be friendly but only as a pretext to selling you something.
I think about what I like to do at social gatherings - the washing up - as a way to passively give back to the space, without centering myself within it; and I think about the kinds of chance encounters you get in person too, just being in a room of 20 people and chit-chatting with a handful of them and maybe making a connection. I try and think what the internet equivalent of doing the washing up is, what one would do on twitter to signal a desire to build a space collaboratively with others.
(I think, absent-mindedly, about BDSM spaces, and the etiquette that you may be a dom, but you are not *my* dom, and someone coming into your space and expecting a hierarchical relationship with you is rude; and then I consider the twitters I come across that are made up of people barking instructions, basically, either the discourse flavoured "barking instructions about morality" or the guru flavoured "barking instructions about what the Gods like", and in both cases it leaves a sour taste, a sense of the un-negotiated.)
I don't really want to create Content, or even consume it really; I don't want to misrepresent my skill or maturity as a pagan, which I know sounds daft given that i have Founded A Religion, but those writings are more for me than other readers and I am just not willing to my spirituality into advertising; I don't want to compete, I certainly don't want to fight, and I don't want to create a sense of the hierarchical - that I know better than others or am more important than them; I do want to learn and meet people.
& ultimately it's a case of choosing the right tool for the right task: modern social media is just incapable of creating non-hierarchical hangout spaces. I can't find the thing I'm looking for on twitter, and that's ok. No one is at fault, but twitter is wrong for what I'm looking for.
All the same, I do feel perpetually sour about it; because, unwillingly, so much of my life ends up being online due to a lack of other opportunities, and so to surface on twitter in order to chill and look at photos and pick up ideas, only to be barraged by the esoteric shopping channel, it just bums me out.
But I hate how the two personae which get you follows on social media are 1. posting bold, slightly combatative statements on the discourse of the day, or 2. vastly overstating your personal magical competence while trying to sell things.
Folk tell me that social media is a "real place" where you can "meet" people; but it's set up to reward certain kinds of behaviour, and because that reward is so specific, it turns into performing behaviour. It's actually pretty hard to find people on twitter, say, who are just...sharing what they do, without grandstanding; who give off the energy of the person you happen to be sat next to at a moot, and get chatting to.
It's such a bad environment of gathering a group of your peers, who you can mutually support on a peer-to-peer basis, & it makes me feel like I'm hanging out in a shopping mall where everyone's pretending to be friendly but only as a pretext to selling you something.
I think about what I like to do at social gatherings - the washing up - as a way to passively give back to the space, without centering myself within it; and I think about the kinds of chance encounters you get in person too, just being in a room of 20 people and chit-chatting with a handful of them and maybe making a connection. I try and think what the internet equivalent of doing the washing up is, what one would do on twitter to signal a desire to build a space collaboratively with others.
(I think, absent-mindedly, about BDSM spaces, and the etiquette that you may be a dom, but you are not *my* dom, and someone coming into your space and expecting a hierarchical relationship with you is rude; and then I consider the twitters I come across that are made up of people barking instructions, basically, either the discourse flavoured "barking instructions about morality" or the guru flavoured "barking instructions about what the Gods like", and in both cases it leaves a sour taste, a sense of the un-negotiated.)
I don't really want to create Content, or even consume it really; I don't want to misrepresent my skill or maturity as a pagan, which I know sounds daft given that i have Founded A Religion, but those writings are more for me than other readers and I am just not willing to my spirituality into advertising; I don't want to compete, I certainly don't want to fight, and I don't want to create a sense of the hierarchical - that I know better than others or am more important than them; I do want to learn and meet people.
& ultimately it's a case of choosing the right tool for the right task: modern social media is just incapable of creating non-hierarchical hangout spaces. I can't find the thing I'm looking for on twitter, and that's ok. No one is at fault, but twitter is wrong for what I'm looking for.
All the same, I do feel perpetually sour about it; because, unwillingly, so much of my life ends up being online due to a lack of other opportunities, and so to surface on twitter in order to chill and look at photos and pick up ideas, only to be barraged by the esoteric shopping channel, it just bums me out.
