Feb 10

Feb 10 Letters on Social Media #13

Young woman with her computer in front of her stares grumpily at the camera

Dee, you know that hilarious guy in the local FB group?

Well, I clicked on his actual profile for the first time, and he’s a total racist. I don’t think anyone in the local group has any idea, and they’re there giving him laugh reactions and attention all day every day. Now I can’t respond to anything he says, even when I think it would be nice or funny if someone else said it. I want to tell the others, but without telling them somehow? Aaargh.

Young woman stares at her phone with a neutral expression

Abe, something amazing has clicked in my brain!

It’s as if I completely zoomed out of Twitter and gained this awesome over-arching perspective, and when I zoomed back in to tweet level, all the idiotic things that were getting liked or RTed into my timeline didn’t bother me any more. Honestly, you won’t believe this, but I didn’t have even the slightest desire to reply to anyone. It’s changed my life! I feel like I’ve been gifted a superpower!

I wonder how long it will last? Cxxx

Young woman on the sofa stares at her phone in the dark

So I look at the Facebook sign in page

and wonder whether to bother logging in, but it says I have 9 notifications, and I always feel bad if I haven’t seen something that a friend’s posted on my wall or whatever, so I log in. What are these amazing notifications?

“X organisation added 2 events that might interest you.”

“A person you don’t know posted in a FB group you never even look at.”

“It’s the birthday of a ‘friend’ you’ve only spoken to once in real life, because you’re friends of friends, and you don’t really know anything about them because they never post on FB. Wish them well!”

“Your friend X posted in A Group You Only Joined Out of Politeness Because You Were Invited and Wanted to be Supportive.”

Etc etc etc etc

If I’m lucky, maybe I get a ‘like’ from someone I actually know.

So my Facebook behaviour now is to log in, click “mark all as read” and log out again. It literally feels more like admin than anything remotely “social”. Anyone relate?

A person with their laptop open in front of them covers their face with their hands

Dear over-achievers,

How are you able to cook such delicious food right now, let alone have the wherewithal to plate it and photograph it well and then share it? I have had zero inspiration for anything, but particularly cooking, for precisely 318 days now, and every competent piece of cooking from scratch makes me feel worse. WHAT IS YOUR SECRET? If you can’t tell me then I’m going to start flagging all your delicious meals as sensitive content because they only add to my sense of futility.

Pol X

A woman holds her phone in one hand while she operates her laptop with the other

I was getting down

because of the constant politics and current affairs in my Twitter feed, so I made the conscious decision that I was going to have a de-politicisation of who I follow and stuff. I even stated it on my Twitter, just so I didn’t cause offence by unfollowing someone.

Thing is, when I started going through the people I followed, I realised that 90%* of them (whether they’re organisations, comedians, artists, musicians, writers, or whoever) are tweeting about politics at least 45%* of the time and that that’s probably why I follow them in the first place.

There’s no escape, is there?

*rough estimates

Letters on Social Media is a humorous series of fictional letters that aims to explore some of the ways our fragile human minds are ill-equipped to cope with the world of digital communication.

Plans are afoot to turn Letters on Social Media into a micro-podcast. If you would like to record yourself reading one of the letters, I’d be delighted. Just get in touch via the Contact page or via my social media, and I’ll let you know which letters are available.

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