Social Media at 32
The viewpoint nobody was clamoring for
Recently there have been a few come-to-Jesus (Buddah?) meetings regarding Social Media and how certain portions of society accept/utilize them in their daily life. By ‘recently’ I mean since the first AOL chat room opened up, because evidently nobody can quite figure out how exactly the whole picture is important to whom and why, or how precisely we can use it to sell more snack foods.
We know, for instance, that Social Media is a Very Important Tool for those in third world countries used to protest and send information in times of crisis. But many Americans are confused about where this foreign internet comes from. Are there special internet-houses? Internet blimps intermittently flying overhead? Do you get it out of a can?
To those of us who have had the Internet from the beginning, it is basically one giant extension of webpages and chat rooms. What many (in every generation) don’t realize is that different groups experience the internet entirely differently. Your average 60 year old on Twitter (“@Clorox I’d love to win ur BleachMe4Free contest!”) is looking at a completely different set of communications than I am, and I’m looking at something separate from a college student, who is almost certainly not contacting Doritos on as regular a basis as I am. This makes it very difficult to advertise to a wide selection of people unless you’re on Facebook, where everyone under 70 ignores you equally.
With all of that said, here’s a very valuable viewpoint: A disaffected 32 year old from the origins of the social internet. Did you ever have a long, impossible-to-remember number as your Compuserve screenname? Yeah, I fucking thought not.
My generation was amazed by AltaVista and found shit through Yahoo Directories. I hung around on Prodigy when the internet was so small you could look through it like a phone book. I remember being astounded that anyone could spend 45 FREE HOURS on AOL in a single month.
So as the internet has grown wider and deeper, we’ve slowly become cyber-agoraphobes, afraid to stray from our own familiar internet houses out into the real world. We’re sad, frightened people, slowly withering against the increasingly brighter sun of the Wide Open Internet. How sad? Someone tried to give me their AIM screenname last week and I was almost the perpetrator of a mercy killing, that’s how sad.
How do we experience the internet? Poorly.
When we finally finish reading the manual.
Facebook, for those amongst the 1/3rd-life-crisis crowd, is used to tell the people you went to high school with how sick you are, when you were last visiting the doctor and the disappointing news he gave you. If you’re healthy the only thing you’re really allowed to post after 30 is wedding pictures and discussions about terrible, rare disorders that your children have. Facebook, like life, appears only to get good again after retirement. The Boomers are loving it right now. If you’ve recently popped out someone’s Grandchild you go 100% Kanye for a few days.
God help us all if Kanye ever has Grandkids.
Facebook isn’t scary unless it changes, which is very scary, because then we have trouble finding our past conversations about Extreme Couponing. Since the youths aren’t using it, we can delude ourselves into feeling like we’re still in college without having to look at people who actually are.
We’re still all going to use this to get famous, but for now the best way to use Twitter is to angrily contact major corporations about how you didn’t get the product you ordered on time. Sad pictures of packaged foods (looking at you, Doritos) are pretty much Twitter PrimeTime. If at all possible, we try to contact at least six or seven celebrities a month that we believe may answer us, despite the fact that they will never, ever answer us. On Twitter, no one can hear you scream.
If you’re using it you’re probably posting pictures of sunrises and sunsets during your soul-crushing trip to and from work, and you feel a small sense of pride when no one can tell your photo is actually through your windshield while you sit in traffic. If you’re not using it, you assume everyone’s just sending pictures of their dinner. This is more true than you’d think and involves a lot of guilt regarding what’s on your own plate (especially how poor your plating is re: the Tyson Chicken Nuggets).
This nigh-useless opinion piece is brought to you by Tyson Chicken Nuggets.
My age group doesn’t go out as much, so seeing pictures of concerts, social events or someone who hasn’t spent their Sunday in sitting in dirty pajama pants with a cat is a rare treat.
SnapChat
If you’re in a committed relationship, you do not have this installed on your phone. If you’re single and you do have it installed on your phone, there is a 60% chance you have unintentionally viewed child pornography. This statistic is both made up and low.
If you asked anyone my age they’d probably be clueless, but I’m employed in the field of Social Media, so I am only mostly clueless. WhatsApp only exists in my head as the thing that Facebook didn’t like because it was mostly supplanting their Messenger program. It was purchased and marked for death, and is currently partway through its programmed demise. If Zuckerberg had his way the inventors would have been outright vaporized, but purchasing their lives in total will have to suffice in the end.
Ello
This is the network that showed up in The Media a few months ago. It has (had?) an invite requirement and limitless tweet-style posting. People have mostly stopped using it since there are no brands. Having no way to screw around with, for instance, the Pep-Boys makes it terrible and boring. It creates profit using potions and seances performed by venture capitalists.
Yo
In this network all you’re able to do is send the word ‘Yo’ to people. I have never used it, because that’s stupid.
Don’t speak English? Congratulations, you’re even more confused.
Kik
‘Kik’ is essentially where cute internet naming jumped the shark, and has further pushed the few of us that have experienced even moments of using it to just go back to text messaging.
YikYak
I honestly thought someone was screwing with me when they told me about this this morning, and it’s what may have kicked off this entire thought process. This is what would happen if Reddit had sex with Foursquare and Twitter. Your posts are seen (and voted upon anonymously) within a 10 mile radius of your location. This has gone beyond Social Media into Social Moreau, and their deformed mutant lovechild is a crime against humanity.
Being in a major city with about seven colleges in a 10-mile radius, I’m primed to use this to “check out how the young people think” (read: creep on Loyola kids). If you’re in a small town or middle America, you can (evidently) get the first-hand experience of realizing just what kind of desolate shithole you’ve signed up for by peeking into other localities when the three people in your area stop posting things.
That’s not what this is, but now I miss my Yak Bak.
Tumblr
I’m admittedly not on tumblr. I’ve checked it out a few times. I assume it’s where all the assholes ended up.
Big fan of Reddit. It’s where all of the rest of the assholes ended up.
Schadenfreude available at wholesale prices throughout the site.
Tinder
This network is primarily to schedule and receive clandestine, disappointing handjobs and subsequently agree never to speak with that person again.
Google+
I keep signing out of this on my phone, but for whatever reason every time I want to edit a picture it tries to sign me back in. Very annoying.
Conclusion
My generation is finicky and angry that we’ve been labeled as ‘Millennials,’ especially since that lumps us in with people who have never even seen Captain Planet. We’re smart enough to figure out what’s coming our way, but as the first generation that might have ever had the chance to exist with this kind of technology, we’ve reached a level of fatigue that’s stopped us from caring.
There’s no upside here — the older we get, the less likely we are to connect to new platforms. Like programming the VCR, we assume whatever’s new will eventually be old and replaced with something easier, which is what happened to us.
The images in this article are badly copied from the internet and sourced by nobody. All rights belong to someone else. Opinions are solely mine and in no way reflect the corporate culture or goals of Tyson Chicken.
