mognet#1 | re: social media
(context: this is an email response to a reader who provided feedback on the social media commentary found in the essay “Gods Among Men and Mer or: SOTHA SIL IS DEAD.”)
Yo,
When I first saw your email—(of which I'm usually notified through my phone, but for some reason, it [your email] did not push a mobile notification, so I only found your email once I manually checked Protonmail on my PC using Firefox on a whim [which, oddly enough, was three minutes after you had sent the email itself])—titled “Morrowind, Social Media, and Long-form Writing,” I honestly expected a long critique and/or attack on my work; something like “you misunderstood the plot of the game,” or “you overuse semicolons,” or “you can't just put hyphens between random words for emphasis like that; compound nouns/adjectives don't work that way—it's confusing,” or “you could have cleaned up this and this and that, and it would have been much more concise,” etc., etc. (These fears likely stemming from some deep-rooted insecurity about my own ability as a writer.) So, as you can now imagine, when I read your email and found it to be quite pleasant, it coaxed a genuine smile out of this pale, blue-light-stained face, especially considering that no one has ever emailed me directly about my writing before. And for that, I thank you.
(Note that, on social media and through email, I usually communicate in mostly lowercase without a care for grammar/syntax, but since you took the time to write such a long and thoughtful email—nearly an essay itself, really—I figured that I'd give you the same respect.)
Obviously, I agree with nearly everything you've written, as what you wrote resonates with the message of “Gods Among Men and Mer or: SOTHA SIL IS DEAD” pretty much to a tee. So, in that respect, I don't have much to add. I will say, however, that your email has got me thinking about disconnecting from social media entirely, which, granted, is a thought that I have every week (sometimes daily), which, as you might imagine, stirs up some serious psychic shit in my head, making me feel like some sort of fraud, which, I imagine, is a common feeling most people have in this modern age, in which using the internet—which even children know is an obvious mental health disaster—is practically mandatory to survive; we are pretty much forced to use it (the internet) and even, in some cases, cajoled to use social media; be it Facebook to keep in touch with family or Discord to keep in touch with friends or Reddit to find simple answers to dumb questions because literally every Google search results in a full page of Reddit links. And, to top it all off, all these platforms are corporate as hell and vying to suck our brains out through the very tubes—(you know, the “series of tubes”)—the Internet is made from (and, recently, I wrote about this at length in an essay titled “CORPORATE DRAGON SLAYER or: Writing is Punk Rock”).
The Internet-being-co-opted-by-corporate-entities bit is important, and it's the reason I have chosen to mostly use defederated platforms for all internet stuff, including Mastodon in lieu of Twitter/Bluesky and Lemmy in lieu of Reddit, although I find myself—for whatever reason—sometimes using the corporate versions here and there; Reddit mostly, just to spread my work to a wider audience—not for profit, as that's not really my intent (my intent being kinda nebulous and weird, but it's something I have written about—also, at length—in various essays here and there). But, recently, I've come to the shaky conclusion that while the Corporate Thing is important in regards to feedback loops, echo chambers, misinformation campaigns, and endless cycles of self-gratification, it's not the driving factor: the driving factor is the underlying thing behind it, and the underlying thing behind it is PEOPLE.
People were not meant to communicate this way (i.e., social media).
Social media does something to our fragile validation-craving psyches. We cannot get enough of social media, and once we get a taste of the validation that social media can provide, we bend and morph ourselves into whatever form is necessary to continue receiving that validation—and, many times, this morphing effect happens with the very first thing that provides significant validation; for example, some right-winger could like your post, resonate with the message (even if it was an unintended resonance), and suddenly, you are catering all your future output to the right-wing crowd because it provides the most immediate dopamine; and, before you know it, you are smack-dab in the middle of a KKK meeting discussing how to whiten-up the neighborhood (or something—you get the point; and yes, I know this can happen in real, bona fide communities as well, but it's far easier to stumble into online). It's almost as if social media itself is designed to be as addictive as possible—and in this way, if I'm being empathetic (which I try to be, always), I can't be angry at the people who fall for it. It seems to me that simply being on social media does something to one's personality, morphs it into some twisted version of itself, the version that maximizes validation. And I'm not above this Kafkaesque metamorphosis; I find myself sometimes editing my own thoughts and, in worst cases, my own writing, because I think someone in my primary audience—(Mastodon, which I'm about to get into in very specific detail)—might take something the wrong way and get upset; and, in this way, I am censoring myself, and that feels incredibly gross in hindsight.
I bring this up because I am very active on the social media platform Mastodon—(and, before I go on, I want to say that I've met a lot of great people there; in fact, about 80% of the people who read my stuff only do so because they found it on Mastodon [many of whom only reply with stuff like “this is great” or “loved this,” which makes me wonder if they even bothered to read the work, but, really, what I'm trying to say is: I'm very grateful for the platform in many ways])—but the platform itself is a huge echo chamber of back-patting and virtue signaling for literally every left-wing cause (which, itself, isn't a bad thing), but, because the environment itself is insular, nothing productive in terms of real political influence gets accomplished; people think that they can just tell each other to vote for Democrats or support trans rights or fight fascism or whatever, but these people are not the ones who need to hear this stuff because they are all already doing the very things they are telling each other to do, i.e., an echo chamber, a recursive loop: an ouroboros of feel-good validation with the ultimate purpose being self-gratification above all else—this feeling of, “look, Mom! I'm telling people to do the Good Things™, aren't I such a good person with good virtues? Please tell me I'm a good person!” while nothing is actually getting done; the whole thing is self-serving and vain. And I'm not saying that we always need to be accomplishing something, either. I don't really have the answer to all this stuff. What I am trying to say, however, is that these places are indeed echo chambers brought about by the human need for validation, and, while being defederated (and, thus, not corporate) is a good thing, it doesn't remove the human need for self-validation that inspires all of the following: fake feel-good shit, posting pictures of video games and/or toys one bought hoping for someone to reply with “wow, that's really cool,” scolding and shaming anyone who even barely questions the platform's fickle zeitgeist, those weird accounts that post one-liners that get a metric shit ton of likes yet seem very much like bots indeed (think @dril), &c. &c. There is something wrong with the whole thing. We, being people like myself who can't seem to stop posting about ourselves on social media, are looking for validation from other “quote-unquote” people online—and I use “quote-unquote” because these are not real, in-the-flesh interactions, but, instead, interactions with profile pictures that may or may not represent who the actual person is behind the screen, so they could, for all we know, be figments of our imagination or bots; I don't actually believe the aforementioned claim there literally, but what I'm trying to say is that the interactions are “cheap” in some way, and I don't think I need to explain that further; it just kinda feels intuitively true for anyone using social media, I would argue—but we will never find true validation from hazy misrepresentations of supposedly real people online; we can only find true validation from within and from the fleshy people around us (i.e., true friends & family). We fool ourselves into thinking that thousands of likes on a picture of our mint-condition copy of Final Fantasy IX for the PlayStation will bring us true happiness (or whatever), but, of course, it never will.
Humans need community, real community—and social media is a false community. Our mental health declines because, for some reason, we continue to believe that social media can replace actual fleshy people, when it obviously can't. We fall deeper into despair then use the very thing causing our despair to try to climb our way out of said despair, thus just falling even deeper into despair.
So, in my long-winded way—(“Interesting points, but kinda long-winded,” as some random Reddit user said about “Destination Ivalice” [lol])—your email has kinda inspired me to maybe, just maybe, remove myself from Mastodon to reclaim the part of my brain that has been overwritten by the Validation Protocol.
Perhaps my soul depends on it.
Thanks,
Forrest
*sent on 11/9/2024