‘Divorcing’ Social Media
Conveniently forgetting the thing that makes the internet so addictive.
At the beginning of every year, there is always a group of people who ‘selflessly’ exile themselves from social media. These incredible feats of ‘self restraint’ are worth applauding to some extent- it takes incredible resilence to limit time spent on something so accessible. But in the tweets, blog posts, and videos that function as one’s online-presence obituary, the final point is always the same- anyone who uses social media relentlessly is the modern-day couch potato. It’s someone so wrapped up in social media, they’re missing the world around them- ‘real life’.
There is a pre-social media history I have with the internet, dating back to around 2002. Sites like Club Penguin and Miniclip allowed me to play games, but the goal was never really to make friends. I’d read Wikipedia (Remember when it only had 100,000 articles?), but I’d never contribute (Wikipedia is social media). So, I suppose my genuine, public, write-about-it online-existence began on Myspace- that was in 2005, I was about 10. It would through Myspace I learned how to code. I no longer have a myspace, so my earliest social media relic still accessible is my flickr, from 2007. Sure, I was on Twitter by 2008, on Facebook in 2008 (Illegally- I wasn’t 13 yet), but it would be my Tumblr that changed everything.
I got on Tumblr in 2008. This was when Tumblarity still existed and there were under 2,000,000 users. It was still the people’s social media. Unsaturated by brands, it provided fertile ground to make incredibly strong friendships. It’s true- from 2008-2012, my friends were based online. To anyone else, I had no life. My ‘real life’ was online. The friendships were no less than what they’d be in reality. We’d have Tinychat homework sessions (This is 8th grade through third year of high school), live blog Apple events, live blog award shows- as if we were together, in a room. Sometime’s it’s a party- sometimes it’s a quiet night. I spent New Years Eves with them, Halloweens, Christmases. We’d add each other on Facebook, Twitter, trade phone numbers, even mail each other things. The only difference from a ‘real friendship’? Proximity and being the target for unwarranted criticism for having it all be based online. I literally grew up online. Just ‘ending it all’ is an insane thought.
Maybe I’m an extreme example, but there are people you only know online. Cutting them off, well, isn’t that social suicide?
