Our social selves
Bring together a group of 10 persons in the Philippines, and chances are that six of them will probably be active on social media. In its Digital in 2017 Global Overview, the media agency We Are Social reported that 58 percent of Filipinos were on social media as of January this year. That’s much higher than the 47 percent average in Southeast Asia and the global average of 37 percent. But it was the next stack of statistics that floored me.
According to the same report, Filipinos, on average, spent 4:17 hours every day on social media, much higher than did citizens of other countries in Southeast Asia (2:07 hours in Singapore and 3:19 hours in Malaysia, for instance).
Four hours is a serious amount of time: enough time to finish watching two movies or read half a novel or pay back some of your sleep debt or cook something ambitious for dinner. It led me to thinking about how much time I’ve spent on Facebook, after nearly nine years on it, and on Twitter, which I’ve been on for nearly eight years. What activities or errands did I abandon to spend time reading articles that Facebook friends or the “tweeps” I follow had recommended or to watch videos of cats learning to tap a summoning bell to demand food?
Edmund Gordon, who wrote a biography of the novelist Angela Carter, considered himself extremely lucky that she had left behind thousands of notes, letters, and journal entries, in part because she never wrote an email or sent texts or used social media. In a recent article for The Times Literary Supplement, Gordon wondered about biographers who might have to immerse themselves in the emails, tweets, and blogs of present-day and future writers for a good look at their inner lives. Blogs and tweets, he observed, have replaced “the hushed self-reflection of the journal with the noisy self-promotion of public utterance.”
It’s no surprise that people use social media for self-promotion, although they might not readily admit it. What’s surprising are the amount and intimacy of the details some people are willing to share. I have, at times, felt tempted to tell social media acquaintances that posts about PMS episodes or some other facet of their daily lives (every meal they ate, every outfit they put together) probably didn’t make the community much wiser. I’ve also been tempted to suggest that instead of “subtweeting” or “vaguebooking,” they could have a little more faith in their friends’ ability to listen to feedback directly. (Subtweeting and vaguebooking are really the same, often passive-aggressive, thing: talking behind someone else’s back, but on social media.)
But complaining about personal trivia on social media seems a lot like going to the zoo and complaining about why the animals don’t behave the way we thought they would. And what’s the harm if, every so often, people perform the better selves they aspire to be on social media?
Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, has said that he started the microblogging platform mainly to give ordinary people a way to tell quick stories about where they were or what they’d seen or what they thought. He’d considered calling it Status. Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in 2004 because he wanted an online space “where you could go and learn about other people.” (Some people have argued that these men have also fuelled the charge of techno-imperialism, but that’s another essay.)
For all the noise we’ve seen or created ourselves on social media—and despite all the online arguments we’ve eavesdropped on or participated in—they remain useful venues for the shared experiences that communities are built around. But four hours a day? Excuse me while I go subtweet about why people should spend time reading more books. Or resume writing in a journal.
(The chapter “Twitter and Nothingness” in Frank Rose’s 2011 book “The Art of Immersion” is a useful exploration of the service, and Edmund Gordon’s “Biography in the Twitter Age” appeared last Nov. 16, 2016 in www.the-tls.co.uk.)