Immediately upon arrival home from a long day of classes, I removed my coat and retrieved my laptop from my bag. “FEBRUARY 20 2023”, today’s date, greeted me upon opening; I quickly clicked past this and typed in my password. My self-allotted 30 minutes of time on social networking sites was now underway.
To provide a little bit of background, I have been a user of many of these websites since I was a preteen in the early 2010s. A few of them got their start in the early 2000s, like LiveJournal, but most of the sites created at that time failed to gain enough momentum to still be in use today. The most notorious of these failed platforms was something called Facebook, which had the absurd idea of enforcing that users use their real names on the website. Apparently, this was an idea people were trying to implement widely in this era, but thankfully people did not want to engage. I couldn’t imagine a world in which my activity on these networks was linked to my real name!
Of course, it is kind of an interesting grey area because these platforms are not a fully anonymous realm. Most people share their usernames with close friends and use the platform as a way to communicate, but it's not really a primary form of conversation for me and my real-life friends, at least. I mostly use the sites to communicate with people I’ve met in forums for shared interests. I have never met any of these people in real life, I don’t know their real names, and I mostly don’t know what they look like. Yet, this doesn’t bother me. The anonymity and opportunity to connect with people from all over the world is what makes these sites so enticing to me; I don’t have to pretend to be anyone I’m not, but I’m also granted the opportunity if I want to.
Of course, not everyone uses these sites the same way I do. Many of them have the option of photo-sharing, which people use in different forms. Whenever I post a photo, I never include any identifying information; it’s usually just of a pretty sunset or a flower I saw on a walk. Some people do choose to post pictures of themselves or of themselves and their friends, but I’ve never really felt compelled to do that. I guess it makes sense for people who have connections with extended family on these networks and want to share updates that way. It’s never made much sense to me, why not just email?
These typically tend to be the same crazed people who are on these sites ALL THE TIME! I stated earlier that I limit myself to 30 minutes per day, primarily because I do not want to become like one of these people. They are not a large group, but they tend to attract media attention because of the way their behavior disrupts the lives of others. For instance, there is a kid I see around campus often who is ALWAYS looking down at his phone, presumably because he is on one of the social media sites.
Not only does there seem to be a disconnect from reality, but I also couldn’t imagine this lifestyle from a practical perspective. The sites are NOT mobile friendly, and the one time I tried to access them on my phone I got so frustrated that I gave up within minutes. A few years ago, there was talk of creating mobile apps for these networking sites, and a few did create apps. However, they were not very popular, as most people did not want to spend unnecessarily long amounts of time online, so they did not get much use. Plus, the culture of the communities, at least the ones I engage in, accounts for the assumption that people are not checking these sites all the time. Having a conversation that spans several days with hours in between responses is pretty much the standard.
Speaking of conversations like this, I logged on to my most commonly used site, Netchat, and saw that my BIF (best internet friend) had responded to my message from last night. I’ve been friends with southernbelle2000, or Ashley, since I was 13 and I met her in a Harry Potter fan forum on the site. We have been entertaining the idea of meeting in real life this upcoming summer and she has just suggested the idea of a trip to Nashville, as we are both big country music fans. As exciting as this idea sounds, I’m slightly apprehensive. What if we don’t get along at all in real life? I reply back, suggesting we could bring a friend we know from real life along too, to ease the awkwardness, but I hope it won’t feel that way. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about meeting in real life though, so maybe it will fall through like everything else. Without constant communication, it is more difficult to make plans. Yet, we’ve never considered sharing contact information outside of Netchat, like our email or phone numbers. It seems to defeat the purpose of casual interaction that the site establishes.
I exit this conversation and begin to check in on other forums I am an active member of. I use this site to talk about all sorts of interests, such as music, makeup, and occasionally politics. I like Netchat because forums are the focal point of the site, whereas most other sites have the feed as the focal point. On Netchat, you don’t “follow” other users, but you can communicate with them via forums, private messages, or group chats. It’s not like this on all platforms.
I used to use one site that was pretty popular for a while, Twitter. The culture is similar to that of Netchat, in that nobody uses their real names and people tend to interact with strangers with similar interests. The primary difference lies in the structure of the site, its centered around a feed of users “tweets”, which are 280 character statements. It employs the concept of “following” people, so their tweets show up on your feed, but this is what dissuaded me from using the site. A few years ago, brands figured out they could use this site for advertising and began to make their own accounts, which have been pretty hard for users to avoid, especially because these companies can pay to have their tweets show up on more feeds. The worst part, in my opinion, was when politicians began to campaign on these sites. During the 2016 election cycle, I was still an active Twitter user and constantly saw material promoting Donald Trump. This, along with the constant television media coverage of him, bothered not just me, but a lot of people, leading to an exodus from Twitter as it no longer seemed to have the anonymous, non-corporate, community feel that many other social networking sites had. An additional, slightly unexpected, perk of this was that Donald Trump lost the presidential race that year.
Caught up in an online conversation about this very phenomenon, I’m interrupted by my timer, alerting me that I’ve now spent a half hour on Netchat. After finishing typing my message, I close the tab on my computer and open up a tab with a reading for class instead, feeling satisfied with the time I spent on social networks today.