Category: Social Media

I stopped following 300+ Twitter accounts tonight, basically anything or anyone political. I'd reached the point that I had to do something, and short of canceling my account altogether (believe me, I thought about it), I figured this might be a good stopgap measure to keep the relentless flood of negativity from consuming me.

I read this afternoon that Instagram has become the latest hotbed of activity for Nazis and right-wing supremacists, which is sad because I still genuinely like the Insta, but I may be faced with saying goodbye to that sooner rather than later since the company seems uninterested in or incapable of policing their service to keep that sort of garbage from posting. Nazi propaganda is fine, but put up an exposed penis and they're on you within minutes. Go figger.

 

…would be for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to all go out of business. Shuttering Twitter especially would finally silence The Orange Russian Menace in the White House and starve him of the attention his malignant narcissism demands. It might also go a long way toward restoring some semblance of civility in society when the ignorant among us no longer have such a ready venue to spew that ignorance like monkeys flinging feces and make it that much more difficult for foreign actors to influence our elections.

(I used to respond to at least the particularly egregious tweets by the Shitgibbon, but then I realized that any response—positive, negative, or neutral—simply feeds his sociopathy. So I've stopped. "Do Not Feed The Trolls" is a perfect strategy.)

I know people say, "Facebook is how I keep in touch with my grandchildren!" or "Twitter is how I stay abreast of events in the world!"—neither of which were apparently possible before the advent of these platforms.

I think social media in general—once a fun, positive way of bringing people together—has become a scourge. We've become so addicted to the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline from being outraged at what other people are saying or doing online that we can't tear ourselves away from our devices long enough to remember that there is real life outside the confines of our screens. Nope, we have to tap-tap-tap that vein.

And as I recently reminded Ben—after he was called to the carpet professionally because of something he posted on Facebook—not all the "friends" in your social media circle are truly your friends, or even have your best interests at heart.

I quit Facebook nearly 5 years ago and it took months for the itch to reactivate my account to go away. Nowadays I go onto Twitter maybe twice a week for only a few minutes at a time before I'm overwhelmed by the overwhelming stupidity of humanity on display. (But TBH I do enjoy the comedic antics of the residents of Vaca Muerta Estates so I keep it around just for that.) While I have loved the photography on Instagram all these years, I'm ready to drop it as well because it seems that lately all I do there is block bots and unwanted ads for crap that wouldn't sell from a Sharper Image catalog.

So if all those "services" dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow I'd undoubtedly go through a bit of withdrawal and I might feel a small tinge if loss at not being able to easily ogle handsome men showing off their impossibly toned bodies in trendy worldwide locations, but my life would go on.

Your thoughts?

RIP, Tumblr.

I have more than enough pictures of nekkid men—either alone or doing things with other men that can cause spontaneous erections in sex-loving gay men and sanctimonious hypocritical Republicans—in my offline collection to continue posting and keeping visiting porn-dogs happy for years, but this is troubling for a variety of reasons and finding new content to share is going to be more difficult, because pretty much all the menz I've posted have come from Tumblr.

Also, I expect you won't be able to access my blog at all using Starbucks wifi come the first of the year either—at least not without using a VPN. (Y'all ARE using a VPN while connected on any public wifi, right?)

If you have a Tumblr account, you can download all your content by going to https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/your-blog-name and select Export. Due to increased traffic on the site in the wake of today's news, it may take hours for it to process.

If you just want to save videos directly that you've posted or reposted, use this link. (The site can be a bit glitchy if you're attempting to capture from protected blogs, so you'll need to use the link to the comments that's on your site.)

I just can't any more.

I joined Twitter ten years ago. Until the arrival of Trump and his minions, the platform was kind of harmless, mindless fun for me—at least in the circles I traveled.

But lately it's become a cesspool of hate. People screaming horrible things to each other and a total lack of civil discourse has soured me to the whole damn thing.

I can hear you now. "Then why don't you just leave?"

It's because I really don't want to lose my @voenixrising moniker in case I ever wanted to return and there are still remnants of those halcyon days of mindless fun to be found if you look.

Take for instance, the wacky residents of the fictional Vaca Muerta Estates, and in particular, Myrna Tellingheusen, "retired executive secretary for Mr. Stanley Bogenshoots, Senior Vice President at Huges Aircraft." Those accounts are a respite, a little bit of insane sanity in the sea of effluent that the social media platform has become over the past several years.

I have several lists created of some of the folks I follow: My Boo (obviously), Apple News, Apple Anons (loved the inside drama that was associated with that group for years, but now it's slowly being overrun with political toxicity), and lastly, Vaca Muerta Estates, where I've gathered all the "residents" of the mobile home community under one roof.

I use Tweetbot as my Twitter client. On the Mac it allows me to show my regular feed and/or any number of lists I've created on screen in convenient columns. On the phone, it allows me to select either my main feed or any one of my lists as the default when I open the app. What I've done to minimize the constant stream of stupidity and hate is to have the phone app open directly to Vaca Muerta. The desktop app shows me only my lists, without the main feed appearing at all. It helps, believe me.

That may keep me on Twitter a while longer. I know the platform will never return to what it had been prior to Trump even after he's ousted from office, but hopefully the cesspool will drain after he's gone.

Some thoughts on Social Media, aka "Get off my lawn!"

Sometime back in the Pleistocene (y'know, six, seven years ago) I was on most Social Media, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Facebook was the first to go. Even before the arrival of the Orange Russian Wig Stand I felt it was devolving into a major political and social boxing ring. I was as guilty of fanning the flames as anyone else, and what finally caused me to step aside, do some self-examination and finally close my account was a comment left on my wall by the cute barista who worked at the Starbucks by our apartment that said, "Why don't you ever post anything positive?"

Facebook was like heroin (or at least what I imagine heroin must be like). I was constantly looking for my next fix, and the withdrawal was just as painful. Zuckerberg knows that. That's why your account isn't immediately closed. He knows there's a better than average chance you'll relapse and come crawling back for your next high.

It was months before I could honestly say I no longer had the urge to click that icon and reopen my account. I breathed a sigh of relief when the thing had finally been deleted.

I'm now in pretty much the same ready-to-quit mood with Twitter as I was with FaceBook. Twitter (at least when I first joined in 2008) used to be fun, but lately it's turned into a feculent vat of toxic hell stew thanks to the 2016 election.

Are there still islands of something nice, something fun? Yeah (check out Myrna Tellingheusen and the other residents of the fictitious Vaca Muerta Estates for a good time), but mostly now it's just two tribes lobbing venomous grenades at each other and an open sewer of nothing but horrific news and outrage.

I've reached the point where I can stand to be on it a couple minutes at most every other day (mostly to catch up with Vaca Muerta and some tech news), but after ten years I'm thinking of shuttering my online presence there as well.

The only remaining social media that I still enjoy and spend way too much time on is Instagram. Maybe it's because I fancy myself an adequately artistic photographer or perhaps it's just because I'm a visual person. Either way, I still enjoy the platform. Yes, even it is getting politicized to a degree, although at the moment its remaining fairly civil. (Where do you think I find the anti-trump memes, anyway?)

But what's annoying me about Instagram is how it's spawned a whole new generation of people who fancy themselves famous for simply being on the platform. "Instagram Models" is apparently a new profession. Along with "influencers." Influencers of what? Do you think because you're 20 years old, have six-pack abs and judging from your photos—apparently can't get your hands on a single shirt anywhere in the world you go—you're are going to influence…what, exactly? What are you influencing beyond furthering  the rampant narcissism that's consuming our culture? Do you really think people are going to buy the same brand of jockstrap you're wearing because you're posing on a beach in Mykonos?

Someone brought this up the other day by not-so-ironically posting on Instagram, "Public Figure: two words guaranteed to get you removed from my followers. Who decides that they're a public figure, and why? Sorry, take your self importance somewhere else."

I responded, "Add to that  "influencer" along with "Instagram Model," aka I don't have a real job but I'm (at least temporarily) pretty and whore myself out to rich sugar daddies just enough to travel the world and take (primarily shirtless) selfies."

But do I follow these men and enjoy looking at their shirtless selfies? Of course I do. They're pretty. And as long as I can ignore their self-importance I can enjoy that. Do they influence me? Not one whit. Am I being shallow? Possibly, if not probably. As I joke, "My Instagram feed consists of bears, vinyl collectors, drag queens, d-list celebrities, and men who don't seem to own a single shirt among the lot of them."

"The computer scientist Jaron Lanier reckons that social media, by its nature, makes you into an arsehole. It encourages arseholey behaviour by rewarding it with more notifications, engagements, and all the rest of it. His new book, discussed at a recent Idler evening with the Guardian's John Harris, is called Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now."

Ben and I were discussing earlier how there is going to eventually be a backlash against technology itself, but long before that happens, there will be a huge, pervasive backlash against social media. I believe we're seeing the seeds of that already. I get the sense that people are just flat out disgusted with what they're seeing online via Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms: the lies, the unabashed hate, the wanton, willful ignorance.

I haven't been on Facebook in half a decade. I've uninstalled Twitter from all my devices, meaning I have to go through the website if I ever want to step into that cesspool, and that's more trouble than it's worth. I'm almost ready to give up on Instagram as well, but I'm not quite there yet (too many hot menz and other interesting images).

Me opening Twitter:

Thirty Seconds later:

I've been a very naughty boy…apparently for telling a snowflake gun nut to shove his penis-extender up his ass.

If it weren't for the fact that so many things are tied to my Twitter login (not an insurmountable impediment, but a pain in the ass to untangle) this might be the impetus I need to close my account—especially since these days I can only stand to be there for two to three minutes at a time at most before I'm overwhelmed by the tide of stupidity.

And now I want to slit my wrists.

Exactly.

After reading this article today, I decided to follow its suggestions and fortify my online presence a bit…because y'know I'm so famous and all I'm gonna get hacked.

Yeah, right.

Well, actually I did it because so much of my online life—like the article's author—is tied to my Twitter login. I'd hate to have to go through what that poor guy did if it was ever compromised.

So I enabled two-factor authentication and downloaded my archive. I opened the archive and started looking my tweets from when I joined the service in 2009. Much like reading my Journals from twenty-five years ago, all I can say is:

For the first few months I constantly referred to myself in the third person (because apparently that's what all the cool kids were doing), as in, "Mark Alexander…had a tasty piece of cherry pie." "Mark Alexander…is wondering if this day is ever going to end." "Mark Alexander…thinks having basic computer skills should be a requirement for employment in healthcare."

Well yeah that last one is still spot on, but seriously…

One other thing that stands out (besides my supreme social media naiveté at the time) is how innocent the service used to be. Like I posted yesterday, "It has mutated from a simple way to express pithy thoughts with your friends into a vehicle for psychic violence and unending hostility."

What's equally disheartening is realizing how many folks whom I once had vibrant online relationships with have simply disappeared from the system. And don't even get me started on the number of broken links in all those tweets.

That is something that's bothered me long before seeing it played out on Twitter. As I've mentioned previously, on this here blog thingie, broken YouTube links have been an ongoing thorn in my side. What good is recording your life and sharing cool stuff with the world if half of it is inaccessible after a year or two, and what does it say about us as a society that we're putting all our trust into recording our history now in zeroes and ones, only to risk having it all disappear in the blink of an eye?

At least the ancient Egyptians had the good sense to carve everything into stone.

A Break From Twitter Showed Me How Broken It Is

By Daniel Cooper, Engadget

In J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise, the residents of an opulent apartment block abandon the outside world. The building offers every possible amenity, from a supermarket to a bank; work aside, there's little reason to leave. A series of incidents turns the block's occupants into savages who spend their days raping and murdering each other. And yet, although the front door is right there, nobody wants to walk through it and escape to civilization.

Four decades later, and the world that Ballard predicted is here — it just doesn't take place in a tower block. Instead, 328 million people across the world spend their days plugged into Twitter, which becomes more of a nightmare every day. It has mutated from a simple way to express pithy thoughts with your friends into a vehicle for psychic violence and unending hostility. Which may explain why more than a million Americans have quit the service in the last three months.

I am (probably) Engadget's most prolific Twitterer, spending hours on the site each day and tweeting incessantly. I justify my overuse because it is the "people's news network," and we need to remain informed right now because there is a lot going on. After all, the US, UK, Russia, North Korea and China are ruled by despots who are actively leading us toward global war. Companies are destroying the fabric of our society, our civil rights and our planet in service of a fatter quarterly profit. Not to mention the annual game of avoiding Game of Thrones spoilers and shit-talking live sporting events with everyone else.

Cold, Blue Turkey

I decided to take a weeklong break from the platform to see if, like all those other quitters, life is happier on the other side. The day before had been a fruitful one, with a handful of my digital bon mots earning a flurry of likes and retweets. I don't doubt that every time I see Twitter validate my work, a minuscule hit of dopamine floods my brain. The delivery method may differ, but social media can be as addictive as hell.

It's a lesson that I'd learn just 10 minutes after making my resolution as, without thinking, my mouse hand-clicked the desktop shortcut for Twitter. I am such an obsessive user of the site that even the process for accessing it had been consigned to muscle memory. It took real self-control, and some degree of itchiness, to get past the initial stages of withdrawal the first day. It was only because I had the crutch that is Facebook, my least-favorite social network, that I could get on at all.

I normally have Twitter's web client open during work, both for newsgathering and as a necessary reward during the day. Then, I'll check the site during bathroom breaks and while I'm trying to put my baby girl to sleep in the late evening. Losing it suddenly meant I had to concentrate on the human interactions around me, as well as get things done around the house. The first thing I found was that I had a lot more free time in my day.

Not the people's news network

For a site that professes to keep you connected to what's going on, Twitter does a terrible job of keeping you informed. It's easy to trick yourself into believing that you're getting the best version of the news, with experts in their field sharing things you'd never see in a newspaper. And there are plenty of smart, erudite folks whose opinions I trust because I know they are legitimately clever people.

But, equally, I'm not above nodding along with a 100-tweet thread written by someone who describes themselves as a national-security expert. It's all too easy to assume that whoever retweeted him or her into my feed has made the effort to ensure that what they're sharing is legitimate. Because I'm certainly not looking too hard at the author of these tweets, even though we should all be actively guarding our media consumption.

And here's the thing: My media consumption has gone up by an order of magnitude when I've been away from Twitter. It's just that I'm getting the facts from The Guardian, The New York (and London) Times, The Telegraph, FiveThirtyEight and Vox. The measured and even tone of those publications is a breath of fresh air if you've been listening to the neurotic commentary that rolls past in Twitter's bottomless feed.

Twitter is the enemy of calm

As much as we like to deny it, humans are herd animals with a herd mentality that can be sent into hysteria far easier than we think. The day I returned to the site, it was full of folks panicking that we were about to die in a nuclear holocaust. It could happen, for sure, but pissing and moaning about it on the internet won't do much about it beyond making everyone unnecessarily stressed. Rather than indulge, I closed the site and went about my day.

We know that social media has an uncomfortable relationship with our mental health, with addictive loops keeping us glued to our screens. But addiction is not the only issue we face, as Instagram has also been lambasted for being harmful to people's mental health. Services like this amplify anxieties about body image, lifestyle, wealth and the many other facets of our lives that we choose to broadcast.

Then there's the paralytic effect of this constant barrage of stress that means you feel as if you are incapable of doing anything. Twitter and Facebook have, perhaps unwittingly, become agents of the status quo — you spend your days flapping online instead of changing things. If I were an evil billionaire looking to suppress dissent against my adopted political cause, I'd write the social-media companies a big check.

Spending any time away from that Ballardian madness, however, and you start to notice changes in your own psyche. I was more effective, more decisive and I had more time in my day — because Twitter is designed to suck away the minutes in your hand. My head was clearer, my sleep seemed to be sweeter and frankly, I could swear that I was happier without its nagging presence in my psyche.

Coming back

My seven-day absence from Twitter has ended, yet I'm not back to using it anywhere near as frequently as I used to. When you've been away from something long enough you're suddenly able to see the flaws in a way you couldn't up close. I don't feel as constantly panicked as I did before, and I feel more effective in the time that I have each day.

If there's an easy way to explain this, it's like the ex-smoker visiting his office's smoking room to catch up with the daily gossip. The fug, to which you were immune before, now chokes your throat and blinds your eyes, and you resolve not to visit too frequently. You can go back every now and again, much like you can do many things in moderation, but not as your one source of connection with your coworkers. Because whatever benefit you get, the amount of poison you need to inhale to justify it is simply too damn much.

(Source)

I tried a week-long absence from Twitter myself, and I have to agree with everything this particular author wrote. I've returned, but I only scroll down about a dozen tweets or so, close the application, and go back to whatever else I was doing.

I quit Facebook cold turkey many years ago, and it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. The addiction to social media is real. I had to fight the urge on a daily basis to reactivate my account until it had been permanently deleted, and even then, for years afterward, I had to ignore the siren call to to return to the network. And I now realize that I had been using Twitter as my methadone to Facebook's heroin, and stepping away from that was much easier.

I'm taking a break from Twitter, maybe permanently.

Since the November election it's become an absolutely toxic cesspool of disinformation and stupidity, and frankly if the world is going to start collapsing around us, I don't need constant 140 character reminders of it.

I'm not going to delete my account outright, but I have removed Tweetbot from my phone and the corresponding Mac app from the dock.

I quit Facebook cold turkey in 2012 when it crossed my tolerance for stupidity and I've reached the same point with Twitter.  It took years for me to get over the need for a Facebook fix, but the detox was necessary to maintain my sanity. I expect it to be much the same with this other social network.

That leaves me with Instagram. At least that one mostly just pretty pictures with only occasional forays into the morass that is contemporary political discourse.

…why you never find me on Facebook again.

From ARS Technica:

"Facebook is considering collecting yet more data from users in the form of tracked mouse movements, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Your scrolls, your hovers, your highlights, your right clicks: Facebook wants them all.

It's not uncommon for websites to minutely track the items that users click on to see how they interact with different pages. A heat map of a page can show where most people end up clicking, giving sites an idea of how users' eyes travel and parse the information there.

But Facebook's tracking would be another level of tracking entirely. According to the WSJ, Facebook will be paying attention to the areas a cursor lingers over, even without a click or other interaction. This seems like a bit of a strange motion to track, as if users are out there lovingly tracing the facial profiles of their family members or ex-crushes like they might do on a photograph. But if there's meaning to be had, Facebook will have it.

In addition to tracking mouse movements, Facebook will also be gathering mobile data. It can't track finger-lingers over a touchscreen, thankfully, but the company will be noting when, for instance, 'a user's newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.'"

What's next? A little blue FacebookKnowsAll^© camera in every room in your home?

I did it.

I not only deactivated my Facebook account, but I also requested permanent deletion since apparently you can't actually delete your own account. Fuck you, Facebook.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

I've been moving in this direction for some time, deactivating my account periodically for over a year for longer and longer periods. Most recently, it was several weeks. I logged back in a few days ago out of curiosity and discovered it was just as full of stupid as it was when I left.

After one of my friends (who feels the need to comment on everything) left yet another innane comment about something I'd posted on my wall, I said that was enough. It was to kill the account completely.

 

All I can add to this is that if—as unlikely it is because you're here—you've already voted—or are planning on voting—for Mitt Romney, unfriend me immediately because we have nothing in common.