Finding and Sticking With Our Own Crowd

The article Covid Pandemic Pushed Social Media to Become Increasingly Tribal by a researcher at Concordia University in Montreal points to a phenomenon that the forced stay-at-home aspect of the current pandemic has allowed to evolve - as we have a lot more time and opportunity without oversight to peer at whatever we wish on our screens, we have been enabled to more accurately define just to whom and what we wish to pay attention.

While we may 'belong' to quite a number of social media platforms and subscribe to a panoply of news sources we have had both the time and opportunity to refine just what information we take away from online sources. Indeed many of these sources have themselves come up with ways we can refine our viewing. A multiplicity of online subject newsletters and podcasts have emerged from news outlets, allowing us to better align our reading and listening with our enthusiasms and concerns. Aggregators like Feedly and Pocket allow us to save and view only what interests us. Special interest groups are formed and grow within the major social media platforms. I myself no longer follow any individuals on Facebook but do belong to (and even have in a couple of cases managed) a range of Facebook SIGs.

The days when intellectuals aka thinking people could legitimately scorn social media in their entirety as a toxic stew of ignorance and lamentable prejudice are almost over. Although online provider AIs are fighting a strong rearguard action to present us with source options they derive from our digital behaviour, just as rapidly app tools are being developed to help us filter out the ignorant and unwanted. With some diligent research we can, in my experience, find ways of screening out much of what we did not ask to be presented with onscreen. 

For the avidly curious like myself serious self-discipline is needed to manage time spent onscreen. This is made worse by the luxury of my retirement from work, allowing me each and every day to roam through the world's digital knowledge trove -  this being largely without the interruptions of visitations and recreational travel during our ever-extending pandemic.

While there is legitimate criticism of the fact that we these days can all too easily avoid being exposed to alternate points of view, the onscreen assault of pictures and text that accompanies each power-on of any digital device demands we refine our sources to a manageable number. What the web has facilitated is a greatly enhanced ability to source the 'long tail', data on specialised, even esoteric, interests shared by few or none in our personal communities. We can now belong to many 'tribes' with no obvious connection to each other and located far beyond our immediate neighbourhood. Nothing like this has existed in history. Russia's crimes in the Ukraine are exposed to the world in real-time.

Current disenchantment with and moves to slow increasing globalisation do not preclude us being eager to find out what others afar are doing and thinking. It is possible to be tribal in one's interests and yet internationalist in one's outlook. Today's internet facilitates that. I can be a Settler history buff and Gaelic heritage enthusiast while still remaining connected across the globe.

 

Five Years Before the Social Masthead

 

I started in with social media well before I heard the term in use. It was five years ago when, newly retired and both wondering what to do through yet another long dark winter, my movie and coffee shop pal, Wayne, suggested we get into blogging about what we’d each come to believe on our long life journeys. Maybe that big bulge of Boomers coming up right below us seniors would find our thoughts resonated with them? In those not-that-far-off days, Booming was still a big new thing, and its zippier manifestation, Zooming, was just coming into the the world, courtesy of Moses Znaimer’s media empire.

Wayne came up with an appropriately serious-sounding moniker for this blog, ‘Musings of an Aging Boomer’, and I our obscure tag line, ‘A Senior Perspective on the Evolution of Western Values since IBM Selectrics and Rock-and-Roll were young’. Though my partner dropped out of posting when that winter ended, I have soldiered on, shifting the blog onto my own domain to highlight the solo nature of its authorship. 

We are up to 136 posts now and my followership goes up and down, but is never a lot. I began this blog with a view to honing a writing style and to explore content ideas for longer opinion pieces. That is where I presently remain. Ninety-eight percent of blogs attract a tiny readership and, while this is one of the more durable Boomer blogs, commentary on everyday life and times is not easy to monetize with cautious late middle age folk who often have only a dim idea or none at all of how to find good writing of interest on the Web.  Without readership there will be no sponsorship to pay for spending time on developing well-written and satisfying posts.

These days I manage a couple of additional blogs. These are not personal but subject related, and content is at least partly provided by third parties. Their subjects of authorship and heritage attract a wider crowd than my personal musings.

About a year ago, I realised that I had better find out what some of the more recently developed social media options than now-mature blogging were all about. This was so that I could decide where, if at all, they could help my authorial efforts. What to choose?  I had already joined LinkedIn years ago so I just needed to revamp my profile to fit my state in life, and start posting again. I added Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, the last at that point in time still much reviled by many pundits as mindless.

As an older person in an age category where Facebook (FB) use is still low, my very modest number of thirty-two ‘friends’ who are actual people (rather than an organization) are a heterogeneous lot, and largely not representative of my personal friendships. In contrast, my thirty-something-year-old kids have pretty well all their real-life acquaintances in their age group using FB regularly as the primary way they all stay in touch.

In addition to maintaining my own personal Timeline, I monitor ten Facebook groups that reflect my recreational interests. Sad to say that the very substantial memberships of most of these communities (some are well beyond a 1,000 members) are mostly middle-aged. Having hobbies is becoming a dated concept that may never catch on with our youngest adult age cohort, the so-called Millennials.

The Loser Edit

The concept of the 'Loser Edit'- the compilation of evidence that a person deserves to be 'put off the island' - started on reality TV shows, from where it has spread to encompass the lives of the rest of us in this constantly monitored real world in which we now live: "The footage of your loser edit is out there...., waiting. Taken from the surveillance camera of the gas station where you bought a lottery ticket like a chump. From the A.T.M. that recorded you taking out money for the romantic evening that went bust. From inside the black domes on the ceiling of the train station, the lenses that captured your slow walk up the platform stairs after the doomed excursion. From all the cameras on all the street corners, entryways and strangers’ cellphones, building the digital dossier of your days. Maybe we can’t clearly make out your face in every shot, but everyone knows it’s you. We know you like to slump. Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be re-cut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit."

"The loser edit is not just the narrative arc of a contestant about to be chopped, or voted off the island, whatever the catchphrase. It is the plausible argument of failure" to be used against us when the time comes. At the top of the pyramid of 'loser' content is the online oversight that our own country's spymasters now perform on us, farther down is all the things we say and 'like' on social media, and at the wide base is all the things our colleagues and acquaintances have heard us say or write that may come back to haunt us when circumstances are right.

As writer Colson Whitehead suggests in the March 3rd NYT article I quote from, our only defense seems to be to crafting and promoting our own 'winner' edit, but how many of us have the time and skill to do so? And do we actually like the sort of people who 'brand' themselves all the time? Is there, indeed, no hope for us against one day being a victim of the loser edit?