Online World vs. Offline World
Remember in the olden days of blogging that there was your online world and your offline world, and they rarely overlapped. The type of post you almost never see nowadays that was a common theme in 2007? My friend/aunt/town librarian found my blog, and I don’t know what to do.
Facebook (and Twitter, Instagram, etc) kind of changed that. Embedded had a post about this recently (sort of). They recount a conversation they overheard in a coffee shop. One person found the other’s Instagram account and followed it, and the other person responded that they never followed back people they know in “real life.” (I personally prefer online and offline because everything is real.)
They write that they don’t know “why someone would refuse to follow their friends on social media.”
But I completely understood because I only follow tourism boards for countries on Instagram and a handful of family members. It means that when I open Instagram, there are either pictures of places I’m going or I’ve been, or pictures of nieces and nephews. And that’s it.
And while I’m not against reading blog posts from people I know, it definitely usually works the other way around: I find the blog, I read the blog, I like the blog, I start a conversation off-blog. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Facebook is a little of column A and a little of column B: people I know in the offline world that I found online, and people I met in the online world that I’m connecting with in another medium.
It is a fascinating post. Go read it and tell me what you think.
2 comments
“I want everything in my timeline to reinforce my wellness in some tiny way—like I could comment on any random thing in my timeline and it wouldn’t be weird. I don’t want social media to be a space where I could mess up or get sad or feel Less Than. I want to curate it thoughtfully as something I actually enjoy…I mute people if their shit is triggering. Otherwise why would I open Instagram? To get sad and lonely? No, I want to see things I care about and I’m not sorry for unfollowing you if your content doesn’t make me feel good.” – While I see this person’s point…life is messy and not everything feels good. So, I would say that when someone’s posts consistently make me want to argue or make me feel bad, I will mute them. Part of it is age, but most people I know offline are not heavy social media users, though, so this doesn’t really come up too much. However, my husband didn’t really get the distinction I could make about online behavior.
When I muted my uncle for his political posts, but was still very sad and attended his wake and funeral when he died from Covid, my husband thought I was being a bit performative, I think.
My kid, whose online presence I don’t even bother to inspect, keeps telling me about how her aunt found her private Insta, and her cousins (with whom she doesn’t really have a relationship) followed her on Snapchat, and one of her friends was sharing stuff from her Private Story. I guess she wants some boundaries, and sets them appropriately (as far as I can tell).
I will say that with my husband’s recent death, my online friends have made me feel as loved as my offline friends. Because I am a pretty solitary person a lot of the time, when I get sad I imagine that no one would notice if I weren’t around any more. I think I have to re-evaluate that people recognize my need for space and don’t mind when I take it.
I’m still stuck in 2007 because I don’t have Facebook/insta/twitter/etc.
I do tend not to read twitter feeds of people I know offline, though occasionally someone I know will be retweeted somewhere I do read.
@a I am very sorry for your loss. 🙁