On engaging versus consuming

[prixmium]

So I am really struggling with having the energy to do much in the evening beyond simple existence. I For the past week or so I have had some difficulty with appetite/stomach discomfort. It isn't that I have entirely lost my appetite, but I don't really have any kind of enthusiasm for most food that I usually have. I am glad that I am becoming less dependent on it for a source of emotional comfort, but I think that enjoying food is a normal function of being a human.

Some lessened appetite is welcome, but between that and the physical discomfort, I assume that maybe I have either encountered a mild virus or otherwise done something to my body that has caused the change. I'm not sure what, though.

It seems to be getting better, though I still had trouble deciding what to do for dinner, and that's usually one of the things that I look forward to during the day, given that my work hours make it so that I only have the energy to get on the computer or anything every few days and certainly not each evening. The time I am eating dinner is usually the only time I have with my conscious mind that is not getting ready for work, going to work, coming home from work, attending to hygiene, and trying to go to sleep.

I've started taking my antidepressant only every few days, trying to help myself feel more emotions and less deadened. It also seems to help with not sleeping quite as much. I don't actively notice a sedative effect with it, but I know it can have one. But that in itself is a gauntlet of learning how to have emotions again apart from survivable, dull contentment on the level of "This might as well happen."

Anyway, I have been enjoying getting in the habit of using dreamwidth more often and talking about more diverse topics on it. Thank you to anyone who is reading this that makes it feel less like screaming into a void.

The thing that I think makes so many people reluctant to take up dreamwidth/lj-style blogging (or to return to it as the case may be) is - more than anything else - the lack of instant gratification and feedback. Microblogging platforms teach us all to market ourselves and to view each and every sentence or paragraph as a product. I am not saying that these forms of blogging don't have their uses and that preferring a low-stress, almost-mindless sort of social media consumption is a bad thing. I use twitter pretty often.

But the more I do this and don't just mindlessly scroll through twitter, the more I feel like I have returned to a certain kind of brain-usage that had become increasingly difficult in my time as an avid tumblr user and, subsequently, a mostly-twitter-user. I mean it is no secret that twitter in particular is designed to cause addiction in much the same way a slot machine would, and tumblr alike with its endless scrolling mechanic created a never-ending accumulation of obligation to keep scrolling, to catch up every day.

Prior to my stint in the school-year from hell, 2017-2018, I was definitely addicted to the internet in various ways. The lack of signal and the desperate trying to keep my students who did have signal from blatantly watching Fortnite videos instead of listening to anything I occasionally got to try to teach them really broke that habit. And I could go on about that hellish experience even more, but I won't. Not good for my blood pressure since I do need to sleep tonight.

I think I have become more attached to my phone again here lately, but I think it's because a lot of the time it feels like my only portal to the world. But even with the itch to check this site or that site or to see if my best friend has emailed me an RP reply yet, my relationship with it feels fundamentally different from the way I felt during the vast majority of my time as a near-daily tumblr-user. And I wasn't even one of those who needed to finish my dash every day, because I knew it was a fool's errand.

I have been working on an (extended) 20in20 challenge over at lands_of_magic and it makes me feel so incredibly nostalgic. Honestly, I often find myself nostalgic for the last two years of high school but not always because of the social things I was doing in school itself. Sometimes, but I also miss just the time I spent with my thoughts, with my feelings. It developed my understanding of myself. I spent more time thinking about philosophical and religious things. I spent more time thinking about what and who I wanted to be. And as much as I think that was part of the formative stage I was in, I also think about how I think that a lot of the noise and compulsion to keep up, to keep consuming silences the ongoing process of just being with oneself or with a group of people to whom you have given at least tacit consent to communicate with you.

On twitter, a lack of notifications in response to your own posts or even your retweets (or reblogs on tumblr) gives a sense of failure. You need to try again, pull the lever, and hope that one of your friends will a) see it and be) respond to it. Whereas here, the occasional articulate response gives me reassurance that some of you are reading my posts some of the time, and your feedback (even when it as as short as a tweet) seems to matter more. There is a slower pace to this that reminds me of dial-up days, which didn't end for me until 2009. And while for heaven's sake I don't want to go back to that torture in terms of trying to DO anything with data, images, video, etc., I guess I do really relish going back to the pace at wish I felt pressured to process my feelings about things like fandom.

Fandom is a part of who I am. It is a subculture to which I really sincerely feel like I belong. I feel passionate about it, even if it is quiet passion some of the time. Sometimes it feels stupid, how much thought I put into it. People often want to insist that it is weird to be overly invested in fandom, or even that it might be blasphemous against one's religious beliefs or something, but I guess lately I have been thinking about how the professional sports community has started using the word "Fandom" too. And they can do that. It's weird, but it's a valid use of the word, and for better or worse, how many American Christians (no comment on sincerity or depth of belief implied here) watch games on Saturday or Sunday evenings.

And I guess my point here is that I am really happy to feel like maybe just spending time with my thoughts about my hobby and trying to be creative with it isn't just some relic of the past I have to keep being sadly nostalgic about.

I don't want dreamwidth to morph into something that retains a pace or demand for consumption similar to tumblr or twitter, but I really do wish that more people from the younger generations of fandom would give it a decent shot before giving up. I think that this experience is invaluable to learn to have conversations with yourself and with others and to have the two coincide without being erased by an untraceable sort of algorithm magic.

Comments

[mxcatmoon]

This is a well thought out post, that makes a lot of sense. I wish more fans, in general, would come/return to places like DW.

The things I've heard about Tumblr/Twitter are disturbing, and I wonder how users will fare in the future. I can imagine others are also having the effects you describe concerning brain-usage. Also losing the ability to have a conversation. There are social skills they are definitely not learning by spending all their time in that environment. The thing that bugs me is, it's not even like these platforms care about anyone, they are only being used, deliberately addicted, and manipulated so the big corporations can make more money. I guess that kind of thing is okay with people today.

I tried to get into Tumblr, but I hated it. And now that I've heard many stories about what it's like, I'm glad I stayed away. I hear a lot of fans complaining about it though, so I really do think the exodus will continue. Where fans will end up instead remains to be seen. I really hope it's DW. Live Journal was great back in the day. I miss all the fandom-specific communities and discussions.

[prixmium]

There was a 60 Minutes segment that I watched a long time ago that got me thinking about it. Someone had worked for one of the big social media companies talked about how they literally designed notification delivery like a slot machine. He had walked away from it in order to create some kind of effort to counteract the brain-hacking that no one ever actually consents to.

Again, I don't really have a hard-line about hating the things, but I firmly believe that one of the only reasons that tumblr has kept the space it has had is its unique formatting for displaying creatively arranged gifs and images. I remember during several of the times when there was a discussion of a mass exodus in the past when I was a daily and avid tumblr user that essentially there simply were no alternatives that didn't necessitate leaving behind a specific, developed skillset for creating evocative images / posts that people had learned on tumblr.

It is sort of a mixture of picspam and fanvid, to have these huge-file-size gifs arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. I made fanvids late in high school, and I basically got left behind by the technology that people were using when Windows made the decision to stop supplying Windows Movie Maker with its OS. It now has a movie editor, but it is literally just for trimming or filtering phone videos basically. I think that even when the end-quality was, by necessity, not as good, fanvidding was a healthier community and hobby for some of the reasons I have mentioned above that tumblr photosets essentially create a middle-way between.

It just takes a little bit of coding, though, to create something similar on dreamwdith and I even made base-codes to do just that over on tumblrmigration.

The issue is still that a person can't just reblog it to show support. They would have to actually comment and engage with the person rather than the product, so I think that this all really just boils down to the rapid acceleration with which we are all suffering under dystopian, late-stage-capitalism vibes.

tumblr wasn't always terrible, in my opinion, though it has changed for the worse and always was pretty ill-suited to conversations. The thing was, people used to just ignore that it was shit for conversations. Now they actively discourage them.

[mxcatmoon]

I admit media and Big Corp has always been about brainwashing and addicting the consumer, they're just more high tech about it now. It's also easier to get to the children when they're very young, now that kids are on the net before they can even read. It's just important to remain self-aware.

Tumblr is definitely the place for images, I can understand artists preferring it. I'm not much into art and I don't make vids (I watch them on YT). My main interests are fic and discussions, so DW is fine for me. I've read quite a bit of discussion about why fans don't like to leave comments, and I understand their reasons, but maybe it would do them good to venture out of their comfort zone. One one hand it would be kinda nice if DW had a 'likes/kudos' thing... on the other hand, that doesn't encourage conversation and might discourage it.

Sorry to hear they took away your movie maker. I wish there was a viable competitor to Win. They've gotten so greedy that many programs that used to be included now have to pay extra for. They used to have a decent word processing program included (Works). Now they even stick a bunch of annoying ads on solitaire that makes it nearly unplayable unless you pay a yearly fee for it. Going a step further, many programs no longer have the option of a one-time fee, you have to pay yearly/monthly fees. I know I probably sound old and poor to people who don't seem to care, but where does it stop? How much fleecing is the public willing to put up with?

[prixmium]

I mean I have very anti-capitalist leanings, and I am pretty broke, so you don't have to worry about sounding old or poor to me! But yeah, they seem to have decided that because people preferred subscription access to some things that they could just stop granting anyone one-time-payment licenses for anything and could just bleed their customers dry, drop-by-drop. The same thing is true with Adobe. Everyone pirated Photoshop because it was astronomically expensive, so they came up with a subscription service. And you know what? Some people would have done that, but then they decided to start suggesting that they could SUE people who continued to use their previous products that were one-time-payment licenses because they "no longer had a valid license."

I absolutely hate how we are gradually allowing the elimination of physical, offline copies of things for the sake of convenience. But this kind of thing is cyclical. I hadn't torrented anything in YEARS, but now I have had to start again for certain kinds of creative stuff.

I want to get back into making vids. There IS a legitimately free videomaker I have been experimenting with lately and apparently signed up for once many years ago called lightworks.

I think that Premiere (again, Adobe) has some intuitive coloring options that maybe the others don't have, but I will have to get further into experimentation to find out.

I also agree about comments. Like what is the difference in clicking a button that says "like" and typing out "I like this!" and submitting except fractions of a second. But people regress further and further into a self-centered, consumption model rather than an engaging-with-anything model. It exhausts me mentally to think about it lol.

Internets

[oldtoadwoman]

I've been so tired lately that even Dreamwidth sometimes feels overwhelming. I scroll my reading list and so much of it is people linking to fic they recommend or other stuff I just don't have time for. I do too much skimming these days, fall behind and miss stuff entirely, and feel a tad guilty that I'm not giving other people the feedback that I know we all crave.

But the thing I like about Dreamwidth is that it's okay if it's nothing more than a journal that I chose to share with others. Most of the stuff that I post here I really do just post for myself. Back when I had a Tumblr, if I posted something that got 0 notes, it felt like a waste. When I post something to Dreamwidth that gets zero comments, it's still a journal entry. I don't feel like I need to catch up on what everyone else is doing before I post anything. (One of the things that drove me off Facebook years ago was a relative getting her feelings hurt if I commented on a friend's thing and not her thing so it became this chore of making sure I was caught up on her stuff and had sufficiently praised her before I posted anything of my own or even replied to friends who'd commented on something from the day before.)

I have mixed feelings about whether I want Dreamwidth to be more popular or not. On the one hand, I really wish more of my friends used it, but I would hate for it to be truly mainstream popular because that's when all the trolls come out.

Re: Internets

[prixmium]

Like you said, it is okay if you don't consistently engage with everyone's posts. But I also think that it is extremely unlikely that you reach a critical mass at which it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to EVER "catch up" even if you want to, like it is so easy to do on other social media sites.

I think that the effort required to interact with Dreamwidth means that it is pretty unlikely that low-effort trolls are going to take up residence here. It is too easy to troll elsewhere. I am not going to say that there weren't toxic behaviors or harassment in LJ-fandom of yore, but it was a different beast.

[anirrationalseason]

I loved Livejournal in its heyday and wish all my fandoms weren't dead on Dreamwidth (to be fair, I have really specific fandom niches). I also wonder if my old love for LJ correlates with nostalgia for my last few years of high school. I was probably just as internet-addicted back then but the internet hadn't yet become this... thing that is now, where there's constant pressure to produce in a high-content, low-attention-span environment where it's easy to get lost or unnoticed in the shuffle.

On twitter, a lack of notifications in response to your own posts or even your retweets (or reblogs on tumblr) gives a sense of failure. You need to try again, pull the lever, and hope that one of your friends will a) see it and be) respond to it. Whereas here, the occasional articulate response gives me reassurance that some of you are reading my posts some of the time, and your feedback (even when it as as short as a tweet) seems to matter more. There is a slower pace to this that reminds me of dial-up days, which didn't end for me until 2009. And while for heaven's sake I don't want to go back to that torture in terms of trying to DO anything with data, images, video, etc., I guess I do really relish going back to the pace at wish I felt pressured to process my feelings about things like fandom.

I think that's exactly it. And I agree with the comment further up that a journal entry that doesn't get comments is still a journal entry; it still served its purpose and you're free from the pressure of having to market it to the widest audience so as to get a response (as you would on, say, tumblr).

[prixmium]

Yes! That is a well-made point about how the artifact you're left with on Dreamwidth is worthwhile on its own as a touchstone for your own brain, rather than something akin to a running commentary that becomes a product for others' consumption. I said it above, but I think that other social media has increasingly required all of us to market our posts as products, and people don't really interact with US so much as our product, and I think that is what sets apart something like Dreamwidth.

Even though Dreamwidth and the OTW are, to my knowledge, separate entities, I think there is a reason that Dreamwidth has remained alive if only as a thing that AO3 users utilize for exchange letters and stuff. Both AO3 and Dreamwidth are utilities created out of a need of something their users want to do whereas most social media platforms incite their users to do the thing the platform needs them to do in order to create free content for them to market something or other, to make money.

[wheatear]

Re: loss of appetite: stress could be a factor. I don't know if you have been feeling stressed recently but if you have it could be something to consider.

I am really happy to feel like maybe just spending time with my thoughts about my hobby and trying to be creative with it isn't just some relic of the past I have to keep being sadly nostalgic about.

Amen. I like DW because it allows for longform content and dialogue. It doesn't have the instant gratification factor, but I think it's more satisfying in the long-term.

[prixmium]

I mean I suppose I am stressed, but I feel like it isn't new stress. My stomach seems to be doing a bit better this week, so I am going to hope it was something acute.

I think that Dreamwidth engagement even encourages me to spend time just... by myself, making a thing. I know that a lot of my past fandom hobbies that I am trying to get back into, writing fic for anything other than exchanges and fanvidding, for example, were things that I did largely offline once the resources needed to do them were available. To use a social media platform like twitter or tumblr, it matters that one is present in a timely and constant manner, whereas what fandom used-to-be or whatever used the internet as an access point rather than its lifeblood.

[dorchadas]

There's definitely a huge difference in the way I use DW vs. the way I use other social media. On DW I'll often write long, kind of introspective blog posts about my thought processes, or a huge account of an entire multi-day event. I feel like if I tried to do that on Tumblr/Facebook/especially Twitter, no one would ever read it, it'd get lost in those platforms' lack of any good way to find old stuff, and most of my friends probably wouldn't read them anyway. They're designed for the snappy one-liner, the hot take, or at most a couple paragraphs, and that's what I use them for.

I legitimately do not understand people who write like 80-tweet threads. Just write a blog post.

Sometimes I feel a little out of place by almost never talking about fandom at all on DW--I played World of Warcraft for six years and I love the Warcraft universe, and I think during that time I posted about it...twice?--but I still feel like there's a place for my thoughts here, which is really nice.

[prixmium]

But twitter is where the people are is the usual reasoning. No one is paying attention to anywhere you could write said blogpost, except us weird often-fandom types who do this.

[dorchadas]

I do read people's blog posts (or Medium posts, or whatever) if they're linked on Twitter, but I wonder what percentage of people do that. Is there better engagement with tweetstorms or does clicking that link somehow throw up an extra barrier that matters?