Anyone use this "social media" thing?
omnifreaker
Posts: 71
Just curious...do any of you use this thing the kids are calling "social media"...;)? Here is a one question survey:
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Nope. I get enough human interaction in real life, LOL
The question is a little vague. My favourite social media platform for news is Twitter, for entertainment is youtube, for Daz news it's the Daz forums.... etc. Are you able to narrow it down a little?
I think this should be multiple choices as well. I put DazForums because honestly, I spend most of my time on here. But, I use Facebook as well and although I am not a huge fan of twitter, I do check in once in a while.
I use Facebook mostly as do allot of other published artists, I'm able to keep up with family far away, clients and friends too. While I hate when the mess with the code over there and mess things up it's probably the most robust and useful social media platform out there, truth be told.
Personally I think the the So-called "Social Media" appears to be about the most unsocial thing on the planet.
Agreed.
Technically I do have a Twitter account but I only use it for news on people/projects I like and I think I've only ever made one or two 'tweets' on it. I've never told anyone the handle and I think I have zero followers, which is excellent!
I agree that the question needs more context - it's not that simple. I did click on the survey and answer, assuming you meant for product-release type info.
For DAZ (Daz Studio or Carrara) related news and interaction I come here. Twitter is mostly just for funny one-liners (I follow a lot of comedians).
YouTube I would not even have classed as social media - it's just another source of news and entertainment to me, like a couple thousand extra free cable channels (where else would I watch all the UK panel shows that I am so addicted to, since BBC America doesn't show them?) - it's not really interactive in any meaningful way.
Facebook is for keeping in touch with distant family and friends from college - I do "follow" a couple groups and professional pages on there but find it really poorly set up for genuine social interaction as posts don't show up chronologically but rather according to some weird internal algorithm that is apparently designed to hide the things I am most interested in and to highlight the things I don't care about at all.
I think social media is as unfriendly and unsocial as those who use it so you get into it what you put in.
personally I've met some great people there.
So have you actually met them in person? I think many social media fans feel that words in a browser or on your phone is "meeting". Personally I think human interaction is MUCH more than that. And it's a lot more difficult. It involves commitment and friendship and helping and sharing in the real world. In social media you can "unfriend" with a click of a button. That's not friendship, that's shallow emotion, IMO. I think Chohole speaks the real truth that nobody wants to admit.
I get so frustrated with the folks that run Facebook; instead of fixing their Facebook Groups app for Android so it worked properly, they phased it out and more or less force me to endure the brief annoyance of my feed before I can get to where they hid access to Groups. Every time I put it in the background to browse the web, I have to go back to that tab when I go back to Facebook.
I do know some in person and others it is not physically possible to meet. I feel no less value to online friends to those who I interact with only virtually.
Greetings,
I use social media pretty extensively, both to keep up with what my physical-space friends are doing (most of whom I don't live near anymore) and many folks whom I've become friends with through excellent discussions. For folks who deride it, you really do get out of it what you put into it.
I mainly use Twitter, and I find the process of focusing ideas down to fit in 140 characters to be a valuable exercise that promotes succinct thought. I use Slack as a chat-system among my extended circle of friends (friends of friends), of whom I've only met maybe 30%, but I like pretty much everybody involved. I use other social systems that you've never heard of, like TinyMUCKs to keep in touch with people who I don't even know the gender of for certain, but I've spent a decade talking to.
I have Facebook, but only because my family is there, and I don't use it much.
I'm on LinkedIn because you have to be in my profession. I use Google+ for technical circles, and for the occasional private group communication. I'm on these forums, of course, although I often pull back my involvement. I definitely use deviantArt which also qualifies as a social media provider. I use YouTube, but mainly as a consumer, not publishing much.
I also use tumblr, both as a producer of content and a consumer of it.
The world of social media is vast, because the ways in which people want to interact is vast. There is no technology as powerful and addicting as connecting human beings together, and that connection doesn't have to be in-person. I grew up with the Internet and its precursors as a large part of my life, so the idea that your friends are only the people you could nip down to the corner coffeeshop and meet is as absurd to me as the idea of being friends with someone you've never met is to folks whose life didn't go that direction.
-- Morgan
Back in my day!!!! (Childhood - early adulthood) in the 80s and 90s... Social media involved going places and doing things, and if you wanted to geotag yourself you sent out a postcard! If you wanted to socialze, you went to an arcade, or a movie, or the mall, or a theme park, or even better yet... You went over to a friend's house to hang out!
Cypherfox, that all sounds great. And I'm a big fan of the internet. But I also think that we humans tend to believe that what we like is automatically good. And rarely do we step back and really look at the effects in the long term, because that might ruin our fun. There are some HUGE negatives to the internet that most people won't even consider. And just a recent example is this insane Equifax hack that exposed everyone's SSN and credit info, which has unimaginable implications. And people spend their lives with their heads buried in their phones, totally oblivious to the world around them. And we've become instant gratification zombies, mindlessly clicking and voting on stuff based on a knee jerk emotional response. People no longer understand anything in detail, we just know about clickbait and hype and the biggest headline.
A friend of mine has had a YouTube channel for the past year or so. He's got like 40 or 50 tutorial videos, I think he said 50,000 views and maybe 500 subscribers, almost all "likes". And most of his videos are at least 30 minutes long.
And you know what he told me? YouTube says that for all the zillions of videos it hosts, the average view of a video is less than 4 minutes. That's right, 4 minutes. And you know what his average view over the past year for all his videos? 4 minutes, just like the YouTube average.
IMO, that's a perfect example of the internet culture, where people become click-happy consumers of whatever pleases them this second, and move on the next second. Does that make for in-depth learning and understanding? I don't think so. Just like, IMO, "social media" has nothing to do with being really social, it's about entertainment.
I was computer literate before most twitterers were born. At some point in my life (about 1969 thru 1994) I was engulfed in computer stuff but it was back when the computers lived in a room of their own in a big building and I went home (when I went home) and got away from them. Unplugging myself for the evening and weekends was the most sane thing I think that I ever did. Then somewhere along the line (about 1995) a company that I worked for gave me an HP Win95 laptop (about $2000
) and forced me to learn it, to use it, and to take it home with me. It's all been downhill since then, HOWEVER, I have retained some of that wisdom about unplugging and have successfully avoided participating in any twittering, tweeting, facebooking, or any other such nonsense that happens to be the nonsense du-jour. I have learned how to use a cell phone, I use a dash-cam in my car, I have a Garmon navigation device in my car, I fix PCs for other people, I get my news and research information from my desktop, I pay my bills through the Internet on the desktop, I take a laptop with me on vacation, I blather with blatherers in this forum, but I am not at the beck and call of some obscene device in my pocket. 
I avoid Facebook, Twitter, etc and so forth like the plague. But I'm old (graduated high school a couple years before the personal computer) :P I also have tape over the webcams on my laptops...if that tells ya anything. LOLOL I find it all to be not only totally unnecessary, but creepy.
Laurie
I don't think it's anyone's business really to define or determine the value or quality of someone else's social interaction on the net or in person. Everyone's experience is different. We all are different.
I'm old. But I joined facebook last year to learn from and share ideas with other published authors. For that, it is extremly useful. My friends list is maybe five people. Hardly ever share/talk with them on FB. Follow Mark Twain's advice on idiots.
Arcades? Pretty much extinct, thanks in part to the home console market. Good luck finding one that isn't a ratty, podunk one in the foyer of a Red Robin.
Malls? If they're not dead, they're slowly dying out. You can thank Amazon and online shopping for that.
Movies? Waaaay too expensive when you factor in tickets + snacks + etc. And why bother with obnoxious, talkative crowds when you can get a movie on VOD about a month-two months after it hits theaters?
Theme parks? Too expensive and getting more expensive by the year. If you don't believe me, Disney's yearly increases/price gouges say hello.
Social media has its warts, but I largely enjoy what I use it for, which is sharing my artwork. I don't actually follow a whole lot of people anymore, especially since most of my friends started getting obnoxious about certain... topics I have no desire to discuss in public. XP
I do have to wonder what the average age of the users here are...
No...I don't really feel the need to share my personal thoughts and activities every so often and I don't need to be re-tweeting about other people's re-tweets either. IF people really wanted to know what's up with me, they will email me or call me and vice versa. I've gotten along without social medial the last 45 years of my life and I can get along without it for the next 60 years.
Finlaena, you present a great argument showing how the internet has caused a lot of human interaction venues to crumble. Malls are dying because everything is bought on Amazon or onlline. Movies are all online, so why pay for theaters? We are all sitting in our homes, and all the things that used to bring us outside is now done behind a computer in our home.
Friendship has become little more than a click away. Yeah, I think the older generation has a different view of stuff like friendship. It's not about interacting and getting stuff from others (information, entertainment, keeping you from getting bored), it's more about being there when they need you and helping each other and going places and meeting people and so on.
That doesn't mean that one way or the other is necessarily right or wrong. As Serene Night said, it's just different. Maybe personal interaction really isn't that big a deal. Who's to say? It's just a couple different viewpoints.
Yeah, I'm neither for or against social media in general. I do think it has its plusses as well as its minuses. But yeah, Serene Night's point is def. true.
I mean, hell, somedays I wish I could just up and quit sites like Twitter and Tumblr cold turkey, because of how obnoxious they can get. But as an artist, I'm kind of dependent on it to get my art (and eventually, my comics) out there into the wild. I was pretty young when personal websites on services like Tripod and Geocities were a thing, DeviantArt was quickly becoming the 'go-to' place for artists, and LiveJournal was about the only major social networking site, before such a concept even existed. I even remember Newsgroups/Usenet groups on AOL, albeit just barely (I was like... 11-12?). It's crazy how quickly things change these days without one even realizing it.
I've been dreaming and hoping for the Internet and things like social media since I was a teen in the 1980s. My mother was a computer programmer who had to get a math degree because there weren't CS degrees yet, and her entire career was spent at a single company (... which was a little weird!). She stopped to have my siblings and I, then retrained and went back to work about 15 years later.
I was on Delphi in the late 1980s, when the Internet was a dizzying community of THOUSANDS. Maybe even TENS of thousands.
Everything has its problems, but I am thrilled to live in an age where most of the sum of human knowledge is accessible through devices I can hold in my hand.
I agree. And if only people would actually USE it to get the sum of human knowledge, rather than watching videos of people playing video games, or people just goofing around, or girls talking about makeup. BTW, if you look at the top 10 most popular YouTubers, they generally fall into those 3 categories. Apparently that's what really interests the vast majority of YouTubers
This!
I can't help that most people are morons, I'm happy that I have the access. :)
One upside to social media is that I can now understand how awful many people are. No veils, no distance to hide it.
Not great for my peace of mind, but I'd rather not be ignorant
Agreed! I grew up as the Internet did and I've just been unceasingly delighted by how a staple of sci fi unfolded around me.
Greetings,
See, that's the core fallacy; that people entertain themselves with idle amusements doesn't mean they don't also use the same technology to get access to the sum of human knowledge. That folks click 'Like' on a cat picture doesn't mean they don't also ask Google about Grendel's mother's name, or for more information about Bertrand Russell.
I don't understand the habit of picking the most trivial of actions and considering it the entirety of how 'everybody else' behaves; it's the avacado toast approach to Millenials. It's 'othering' in its purest form. That people tweet mind-numbingly boring things sometimes doesn't mean that they don't also tweet heartbreakingly beautiful things. That someone watches makeup application videos (which I have, in fact, watched, and will tell you that it's a great way to understand how to use the makeups that come with DAZ 3D characters!) doesn't mean they don't also let Khan Academy videos play. My wife watches Fallout New Vegas gameplay videos, but she's also created a really beautiful YouTube video of an elven version of a bedtime song she sings to our kids.
It's not that easy, it's not that reductionist, and the variety of human behavior is present on all social media, no different really than in the physical world. All of us, including the decried 'vast majority' of users of all the platforms, are simply more complex than that.
It's not just that I like it; I know there are problems, and deep ones, but on the whole...we are so, unimaginably, vastly better with the ability to reach out at any moment to each other and find someone in the world not just in our little corner of it, who has seen what we're seeing, felt what we're feeling, and can give advice, and if not a literal shoulder to cry on then a virtual one. Social media allows people to coalesce around ideas, images, experiences, and stories. That you think some of those stories are not worthwhile doesn't make it true. Yes, it allows truly awful people to find each other, but that's the price for letting everyone ELSE find their people online, and it's a price worth paying. Even if the 'everyone ELSE' are giving makeup tips for how to do your eyes so they look like Batgirls under her cowl from the splash screen of a videogame. (Which was, by the way, a literally eye-opening video for me; she did her eyes to look like a rendered video game character, so she could cosplay her...SUPER cool! :) )
Anyway, if you couldn't tell, I'm generally opposed to the idea of 'Your fun is wrong!' as long as it's not hurting (or advocating hurting) someone else.
-- Morgan
100% agree with Serene Night here. I'm actually not a social person at ALL in Real Life. My greatest friends are online. I know that makes me sound like a real sad sack LOL but truthfully, I feel I interact with more people online than I do in real life. I actually don't even know any people who are artists in real life - I have no-one to discuss art with, or problems with my art or how to do something in DS or anything to do with art at all. But I can jump online at any time of day, and one of my friends will be there - we can chat and laugh and discuss art stuff and movie stuff and everything else...and I don't have to be wearing pants at all!!!
I also feel that I can talk more to an online friend - I say things and discuss things that I probably wouldn't with a real life friend. And the people I chat with and associate with are REAL people - no sock puppets. I choose to surround myself with nice people online and I think I have more of a choice doing it online than I do in real life. In Real Life, I'm a hermit. In online life, I am Ms Mary Sunshine, chatting to everyone adn the life of the party! LOL
Agreed. But like the poor, we'll always have the Puritans and the Miss Grundys with us.
Personally, I quit Facebook a couple of years ago, and don't miss it. Never did sign on to Twitter.
DA, Gab, and my own webcomic give me enough electronic interaction. (And here.)
I much prefer face-to-face interactions, where I can see people's expressions and body language.
I love the way my girlfriend smells while she's sleeping.
I enjoy visiting my local coffeeshop and meeting new people, and being suprised when one I met
before walks in. I enjoy meeting people who disagree with my thoughts and views, or who have
different interests and hobbies, different areas of expertise, because that's how I learn new things.
A good, civil debate is like aerobics for the brain.
And if someone wants to threaten me or call me names, they have to do it in person, face-to-face.
There's no substitute for a physical presence, a touch, a hug... Or being able to see a person's face
when they say "I understand".