#deleting my twitter account i lost touch with a lot of visual artists i liked

[ortie-pnk]

We are supposed to interact with the web we visit. We are supposed to upload and download. We are supposed to leave a footprint behind us, other than cookies and trackers.

The web will not stay still, it is perpetually changing and what we are seeing today may not be tomorrow.

Share your things, comment and post.

But also save what you want to keep : write down the name of the artists you follow, download the content you like to stream, copie/paste the posts you want to re-read... We forget faster than internet but it is still fragile. What you got on a disc is far more durable.

[tylerbiard]

Some Social

So, in yet another bout of procrastination from my studies, I found a link via Facebook to an insightful article on Gen Z (or iGen), and sort of just immersed into it.  The article goes to great lengths to describe the incoming generation’s mindset and how it’s penchant for mobile phones and social media is destroying their mental health, which made me ponder my own life.

I know I’ve talked about Gen Z before, and my dealings with them, comparing them to my generation, the infamous Millennials.  I probably came off as smug.  To be sure, a lot of the things associated with Gen Z, even things that came to the fore with my generation, aren’t things I’m really enamoured by, but they aren’t the fault of Gen Z any more than they are the fault of Millennials.  I’ve actually been hearing more about Gen Z in media lately, almost as if the world has actually realized that we can’t have people born in the mid-’80s apart of the same generation as those born in the early 2010s.  I’m really just trying to not feel usurped by this upstart, now-trending generation. Gen Z encompasses people born from the late ‘90s to early 2010s, a generation that doesn’t remember 9/11 or a world without smartphones. Spooky, eh?

For me, what the article describes of the Millennial upbringing is accurate -- I did grow up with computers and the internet, but I didn’t have it around me at all hours. I remember in junior high, rushing out after school, to catch the earliest bus home so that I could chat on MSN with a friend living in Spain before he had to go to bed.  But that whole day at school?  Aside from class-designated computer time in a dedicated lab, which didn’t even occur daily, it was entirely offline.  We weren’t even able to bring our own laptops to school until 11th grade, and even then, most didn’t.  My first cellphones could only arduously send SMS via T9 technology, which limited its usefulness.  And accessing the internet with a circa 2002 Nokia?  What a joke!  This was an epoch before the endless onslaught of apps, a world without filters and Bitmoji.  Essentially, even though we largely got our first cell phones by 13 or 14, they were quite limited in capability.  What’s more is that they were strictly banned from usage during class time in junior and senior high, something that was lifted a few years after I graduated high school.  I realize this last bit is more geographically-dependent, as I’m sure many school boards throughout the world were more lax on cell phone usage circa 2008, and even with the outright ban, many still snuck it into class.

Furthermore, I didn’t really grow up with social media.  I know I’m a bit of an outlier for a Millennial, but I had Tumblr before I had Facebook, and the only social network I was apart of in high school was Flickr.  Still, I watched as peers, using Nexopia and Facebook, and migrating to early smartphones, fall prey to the now all-too-common side effects of social media and chatting.  Hell, I still dealt with it through MSN, Flickr, and such.  Our app-centric, mobile world is merely an outgrowth of this paradigm. 

Now, though, things are different.  I have an iPhone, I have multiple social media accounts, and use multiple chat services.  An onlooker could easily peg me as one fully in embrace of the 2017 “always on” lifestyle.  This is where the article really started to intrigue me.  A lot of what the article was describing vis-a-vis the Gen Z kids seemed applicable to this late Millennial.  Perhaps partly due to my not being that far removed from that generation’s eldest cohorts. Although I did grow up without iPhones and iPads and the ability to constantly be “on,” it’s now 2017, and that difference has eroded. I was surprised at the kinship I was feeling towards Gen Z and their woes mentioned in the article.  I may remember a time before all this stuff, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m living it now.

I recognize I spend too much time on social media, on chat apps, and to a lesser extent, my computer.  It does make me feel much lonelier than when I spend time in the physical world with friends and family, even if too much of that is exhaustive.  It does produce an environment where it’s inevitable to compare yourself to others, and resent others for how much fun they’re projecting on Instagram and Facebook, even if it’s really just a veneer.  Things like read receipts, last active information, and so forth just further aid at digging in the dagger.  It also produces an environment where you’re more likely to just stay in and send Snaps to friends than go out with them, which goes against human nature, as a social species.  It’s obviously extremely toxic and yet most can’t stop the vicious cycle. 

I’ve had my issues with Facebook in particular, and regularly contemplate deleting it, especially now that you can have a Messenger account independent of Facebook.  I’ve deactivated, I’ve deleted the app; now, I’m merely abstaining from posting to it and have moved the mobile app to a more hidden locale on my phone.  But honestly, it’s a problem I have with pretty much all social media, at least social media that is more personal.  I’m more ok with Twitter; it’s mostly just news and memes, not a detailed look into personal lives.  Tumblr is similar, due to its more anonymous nature, although when it was a more active platform, I had the same issues with it.

I recognize that I’m happier when I interact more with the physical world and I really don’t like spending so much time online.  But for me, there’s two major impediments to either significantly curtailing usage, or doing a total blackout, and I recognize it as a detriment to my health.

The first is school, which is obviously not actually related to social media, and so it isn’t an obvious reason for why I can’t stop spending time online.  But, because of how post-secondary is set up now, a lot of stuff occurs online, be it through e-mail, or eClass, where you gain access to readings and slides, not to mention being a place to take notes.  I’ve stopped typing notes, except in special cases, though I still end up using a computer to access other essential stuff for my courses.  And in doing so, it is all too tempting to look one tab over to Twitter, or see a new notification on Facebook, and then you go down that rabbit hole, and bam, you’ve lost 30 minutes of productivity.  I’m beginning to intentionally keep my laptop browser’s tabs all school related now, though I sometimes still get tempted to open new tabs, or tabs sometimes remain open from downtime.  The other, ancillary thing to being on campus is that I’m out, which means I have my phone on me, which means it’s always just there.  I may turn my phone to ‘do not disturb’, but the addictive qualities of smartphones just means I will still manually check for new notifications every now and again.  To entirely remove the distraction of my iPhone, personally, it can’t be present, which is why when I do homework at home, I make sure my phone is nowhere nearby.  Perhaps I should start leaving the phone at home.

The other impediment is more obvious to those who are aware of my background as a photographer.  Since DeviantArt and Blogger, through Flickr, Facebook, et al, and onto Instagram, social networks have been utterly vital for 21st century creatives to push their work to the wider public.  So, although it can be fun to just use social for everyday stuff, I use it as a more serious avenue, and feel it as a necessary evil nowadays.  How am I supposed to share and connect with other artists in 2017 if I do a social media blackout?  A blackout may solve the previous impediment, but not this one.  Having an Instagram is now so essential to share content as a creative.

I could do away with the smartphone, and only use social media and the internet when I’m connected to a computer proper, and essentially live a 2005 existence with the 2017 internet.  I’ve contemplated swapping the iPhone for a flip phone, and I swear it’s only partly over 2000s nostalgia.  I honestly am not hating that idea.  A problem arises from something I’ve belaboured before -- my disdain for the mobile-centric nature of social networks nowadays.    Sure, you can browse and explore Instagram from Chrome on your PC or iMac, but you can’t DM, you can’t view Stories, and most importantly, you can’t upload without tricking your browser into thinking it’s an iPad. Of all the social I use for more serious use today, Instagram is by far the most pivotal, due to its visual nature and strong engagement.  I’ve connected with a lot of amazing photographers, artists, and friends through it.  Even if mobile phones are to blame for teen suicide now being higher than teen homicide, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re at the zeitgeist for connecting in 2017, and app developers know that kids are using their phones far more than their computers and correspondingly create experiences that are mobile-centric.  It helps coding for a mobile interface is easier than a traditional desktop interface, too. 

As things continue, it seems like crucial connections will be increasingly on platforms that couldn’t give a rats ass about desktop interfaces, and so I realize a mobile device is still necessary, unfortunately.  Perhaps I could swap my iPhone for an iPod Touch, or migrate my SIM card to a “dumbphone” and keep the iPhone as a Wi-Fi only device (basically turning it into an iPod Touch).  I could also just get an iPad.  I actually sort of like that idea, but many mobile apps, like Instagram and Snapchat, don’t have a proper version for this mobile device.  I could just get an Android tablet, which doesn’t have the same differentiation that iOS has between phones and tablets, but I’ve had issues with Android, such that, at the risk of sounding like a Cupertino cliche, I’d rather have an iPad if I got a tablet.

Regardless, something needs to change. The current reality is too connected for my well-being.  My productivity is way down, too.  I’m too distracted.  What I find most ironic is that I was planning on watching The Social Network tonight, and instead, got engrossed in a random article, which inspired me to write an essay for the first time in eons with Starboy as my backdrop.  The result was still the same, however -- I again thwarted plans to further push through studies. 

What a world we live in.