Table of Contents
“Kim Kardashian’s Giant Butt Eats Her Bikini!!!”
I'm unsure whether it was the BOLD headline type face or the three exclamation points that settled the matter, but some how this Twitter message got through to me.
Yes, it did!!!
Medium for Interactions & Stuff
Hi everyone, how ya doin’?
Please remember as you read this that ANY declarative statement that includes the phrase “and stuff” at the end spoken to you by someone means you are socially interacting with a fuckin’ idiot.
That understood, I was thinking about how social media sites, like Medium, want us to be more interactive and stuff. I mean/they mean, not so transactional. I’ve heard this a few times and I certainly get it, as I am meeting more and more terrific peeps here. (“peeps” is groovy, 1990’s slang for peoples and stuff).
I am a flaming extrovert who loves attention and the spotlight, kind of like Trump only not a fuckin’ Nazi psychopathic racist piece of shit pandering to the bottom half of peeps living like slime balls on the sub-flooring of a rotting barrel of shit. You know who I mean, all the fascistic, stupid peeps and stuff. So, come to think of it, I guess I’m not really like that tangerine fuck-nut at all.
I am meeting more and more terrific writers, brilliant, young, gorgeous and smart as fuck and stuff. And seeing as how I’m not just “older” but genuinely fuckin’ ELDERLY (and stuff) I can play mentor and Emeritus Antifa to those of you who can put up with my ego. Ergo:
In the spirit of Social Media style shit: I wanted to tell you all, via this interactive opportunity that just last evening my wife Patti and I watched Part 4 of Be Sweet, Obey and Pray. It is a fab documentary about Warren Jeff, a bug-eyed pedophile “prophet” doing multiple life sentences in Texas prisons for raping pubescent girls with their parents' permission b/c, God and stuff. (“fab” BTW is 60’s shorthand for “fabulous”).
We also watched, in order to cleanse our souls of Warren’s devil stainage, Searching for Sugarman, an amazing documentary about Rodriguez, a saintly, in the truest, best sense of the word, poet and artist who you will idolize and adore and admire and never forget once you watch the film.
To conclude this social media styled, non-transactional posting: I don’t have any pets right now. Our dogs got old and died. And I’m allergic to cats. And I’m not that interested in food and cooking or shopping or come to think of it, anything, really, except writing and re-learning how to play guitar, which you’ll never hear b/c I play just for myself.
Further, I dislike children and being around them, so a lot of standard Social Media stuff that peeps send out like pics of plates of food, kittens being cute, their stupid grandkids etc. etc. and on and-on-and stuff — I can’t help you with. But here we are socially interacting nonetheless.
The clickbait pic uptop is more to my liking. I like Patti and mysterious shit. And...never mind, you know the rest already?
Okay here’s another pic I like b/c I can almost SEE you reading this and thinking deeply about our social media interaction:
Or,
You know,
Not.
The Twitter Disaster
I was on Twitter long enough (several years) to build up over 7K followers. I left it to pour my interest into Medium, which if I have this right came as kind of an offshoot of Twitter where I have more than 3K followers.
Fellow writer from Medium, Vincent Triola, works with me to try and develop a new and more successful approach to finding readers for our work and home for that work.
In addition to gathering the best of our Medium and other pieces together into e-books and PB on demand publications via Amazon, we are, thanks to Triola’s brilliance at SEO and all manner of online savvy, developing new web pages where our work can be presented in a more effective manner.
What is happening to Twitter now, the Musk ruination of it, can happen to any online site, including Medium — nothing lasts forever and the best way to deal with changes is to already be working and planning on one’s next move.
Perhaps Twitter should try the approach of cultivating quality entertainment, newsworthy, and other content instead of pandering to mindless political sychophants and swarmy marketers.
Proudly Suspended From Facebook
Why? Who the fuck knows?
And more to the point,
WHO THE FUCK CARES???
When Facebook suspends, (Trump, Alex Jones) they’re not suspending their BEST, their suspending the internet equivalent of murderers and rapists and, I assume, a few good people...
And so, with gusto:
WHO GIVES A FUCK?!
More to the point, why is ANYBODY still using the Suckerberg-Machine?
The Social Media Illusion
Feeling the social media angst?
As my friend Terry Trueman related already, the social media experience often comes to a frustrating end. There is no doubt that social media has a negative impact on many people, explaining why so many abandon the platforms or rarely look at them. Yet many people continue to subject themselves to this practice, despite feeling horrible, because they are cannot see through the social media illusion.
For many people, especially those believing or deriving some benefit from social media, seeing the illusion of social media is nearly impossible. An entire generation of people learned the illusion of social media the hard way. Millennials, more than any other group, suffered social media's illusion that promised to solve problems and expand diversity and instead watched as a maniac came to power fueled by the illusion of social media. People say Trump won the election because of social media campaigns spreading fake news, but in reality, Trump won because half of America is stupid and he appealed to those idiots. Want proof? Social media banned the man, but he keeps affecting politics.
The illusion of social media always shows an effect claiming itself the cause, good or bad, but when examined, most circumstances impacted by social mediaof often have other more significant causes. Since there is no critical examination or follow up, the illusion thrives.
When Egypt had its revolution a few years ago, media praised social media as the vehicle for unifying people: a reoccuring theme of social media finding a way to pat itself on the back and take credit for things it had nothing to do with except maybe help communicate. For example, when LA riots after Rodney King’s trial ensued, no one glorified the television as the means which everyone got together and decided to take to the streets and protest.
What other method would Egyptians use during the revolution?
Facebook and Twitter are free global communication utilities so their use would be expected.
If social media stirs people to democracy, than why is Egypt still far from democratized, with laws as restrictive on the populace as before the coup? Egypt is a country struggling with complex internal issues that cannot be solved overnight and certainly not by social media.
Another example is the Boston marathon bombing which social media was the cause of law enforcement to waste time on misinformation and even a false accusation.
Many news outlets quote and glorify social media reinforcing the illusion of social media being something more than a communication app. Social media, more than any other reason, is an illusion because it is a fake culture and socialization process.
When people interact in social media they self-censor and take care to express themselves correctly, which all the time goes wrong: usually when they are too authentic. No one talks to close friends using the same effort to articulate the way they do on social media. More than just a faux conversation, social media is not real conversation as it is more like an announcement rather than a discussion. That is why Twitter has been successful in its approach with limited numbers of characters because they know, no one is reading long messages. This begs the question: if you’re not actually conversing on a Facebook page then what is the point of social media and why is it alluring?
Social media is in very large way a self-constructed monument. For the vast majority of people who don’t own websites or anything which reflects them, social media is a statue of them, symbolizing their many positive qualities and accomplishments: college, kids, job, etc. People are not liking each other but liking their monuments and the more people who like you, the more appealing your monument becomes, at least to you. This forms a fake culture and herd mentality where people thoughtlessly like and make comments without much critical thought and none of it means anything. What is funny is the fact that everyone knows this yet still falls for the illusion.
The illusion of social media is so powerful that it has led to all kinds of scary situations in which people have been killed, committed suicide, and done other terrible things because they believed. Consider the idea of cyberbullying. There is, without question, cyberbullies and these bullies verbally assault and rally people against an individual but this bullying can only persist if you willingly participate. If you have Facebook and people bully you, the easiest solution is to shut down the Facebook account. Not only are you no longer subjected to the online bullying but quitting the application removes your profile as the point of conflict.
The cyberbully can’t bully you unless you’re digitally present.
Unlike school bullying, where you must endure these people all day without choice, cyberbullying is very much a choice. Ending use of social media might not end real life bullying but it is one less aspect of the bullying problem to deal with. One can argue the injustice of a person forced to leave social media because of other people, but if the application has devolved into bullying, then what difference does it make?
Tech companies work hard to foster a the illusion of social media, making people believe they need connected for many different reasons but truthfully there is no reason you need to be connected online. If someone wants to talk to you, they can text just as easily as messaging on Facebook. The fascade of social media has so successfully been foisted on people that many think of this tool as the public square. Perhaps social media has the potential to be the public square but not without serious regulation.
I leave you with this consideration: would you really want Elon Musk, current owner of Twitter, conservative, and billionaire as the person controlling the digital public square, which he has a vested financial interest?
Copyright Vincent Triola & Terry Trueman
