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10 Things You Need To Stop Tweeting About
I caved in on my intended three-month hiatus from Facebook this morning. I lasted two months, which isn’t too shabby. It was a good break, and it spurred me to make a whole slew of changes in my online life: I canceled my Twitter account outright, I purged my RSS feeds and discovered a variety of other sites I hadn’t seen before, and my interest in this site was rejuvenated. I also had to come to terms with leaving a website I had been very involved with for a long time, which was painful but ultimately the right thing for me to do for my own good.
I still have some issues with the nature of the discourse on Facebook. As online communities have flourished and fallen over the years, it seems that the good ones are those that carefully balance substantive discussion and the tendency of online people to fall back on snark and fatuous quipping. There’s room for both, but the sites that try too hard to be earnest and sincere tend to become either sanctimonious or batshit-insane, and the sites that never get beyond quips and snark devolve into constant games of one-upsmanship that can be entertaining but ultimately pointless. Facebook suffers from the latter, along with a few other borderline tendencies. I do think, though, that as long as one is attuned to these tendencies, it’s possible to make use of the site; the trick is not succumbing to the temptation of playing the game.
Back at the beginning of October, I said that I believed that blogging would have to pretty much die out before it could begin again the way it was at the beginning — small clusters of people writing and commenting on one another’s writing — but it would appear that day is still far off. Getting back to the business of posting most days of the week has been a good exercise for me, but blogging is still busy dying rather than waiting to be reborn. My decision to start participating on Facebook again despite its many drawbacks is a solid acknowledgment of that fact. What has to change in the meanwhile, I think, is how I make use of this website to get beyond the blog model that has propelled it for almost a decade.
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