I kinda hate Instagram and other trivial Gen X complaints

Witty comment about how social media makes us less social

#hashtag #facebook #socialmedia #feedthealgorithm #foodporn #fuckyouimgonnapostwhatIwant #instagramismakingpeoplestupider #lowiq45 and other meaningless statements.

It was maybe 2005 or 2006. I had a MySpace account. Most of you of a certain age did as well. We met new people. Connected with old friends. Discovered new music and comedy. All of that in one of the most stunningly horrific interfaces the internet has ever known. Everyone's page looked like some 1995 HTML monstrosity. Wallpapered animated GIFs. Unwanted autoplay music. Green text on black backgrounds.

It was an aneurysm burst level of aesthetic pain, an internet acid attack. I think it was about 2007 that I started using this new social media site called Facebook. A lot of my high school acquaintances were on it and it was fun to reconnect, discover what everyone had been up to in the last nearly twenty years. It had a far less customizable interface. Simpler. Cleaner. Less convoluted than MySpace.

I started using it more than MySpace between 2007 and 2009. During that time they added games. Farmville, etc. The games that suddenly all your friends were pestering you to click on so they could get some extra resources so their corn would grow more quickly or some stupid shit like that. Alas, I grudgingly admit my guilt in this.

I worked on a cross country video blog project for a local producer. It was for Volkswagen. We were driving a Jetta TDI and a Prius from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon over 17 days via the most circuitous route you could imagine. I was the editor on the gig. I was grabbing 60-90 second clips from our stops at the VW dealerships along the way and posting them to YouTube and MySpace, but I was also dabbling with using Facebook for this project as well. The producer wasn't terribly Facebook savvy yet (he would be in short order!), so he viewed this extracurricular social posting as a value add. Not necessary to the project, but what harm could it cause?

During these 17 days and 8500 miles, I started posting photos and my thoughts on the places we visited multiple times per day. A blog of sorts. I think I can trace my Facebook habit to this project. After this trip, I gave up on MySpace. It was a bloated, confusing, ugly mess. Facebook was the new deal.

There weren't Official Pages yet. Groups were a new thing.People still poked each other. It was a simpler time in social media.

I was starting year 5 of the 48 Hour Film Project in Seattle and it occurred to me that this Facebook thing could be a useful recruitment, and community development tool. Yup. It most certainly was.

The Seattle 48HFP was growing at this point. About half the size it is now, and I attribute a lot of its growth over the last 10 years to social media's pervasiveness.

I made a huge blunder in execution at this point though. Back then, I was posting about politics like crazy while also trying to recruit for the 48HFP. These two activities were not necessarily all that complementary to one another. My friend group tends to be a bunch of left wing, highly political individuals. My 48HFP social group is far broader in its political scope, and more reactive to political posts.

More and more of my FB friends were related to the film industry and the 48HFP. A lot of my political posts were rubbing a certain portion of the audience the wrong way. I was getting into political arguments with people that I was hoping would participate in the 48HFP, so I was kinda shooting myself in the foot by mixing my personal social media presence with my professional presence.

Official Pages eventually came along and groups had become a powerful asset for my recruitment and community building efforts, but the damage had been done. My personal social media presence had become so intricately intertwined with my professional social media presence that it had become difficult to post personally about the things that mattered to me at my very core... relatively radical left wing politics, and heavy metal with a good dose of food porn solely to annoy a certain subset of friends who are easily set off by such things.

The 48HFP page and group grew over time to become useful resources for a not insignificant portion of the Washington filmmaking community. Still though, my personal social media identity had become inextricably intertwined with my professional identity. For the benefit of my 48HFP endeavors, I had to make a distasteful, but necessary call. Politics and religion (can those two really be separated in the modern age?) needed to be removed from my personal feed.

I started posting more food photos. Thoughts on travel. Music I was into or music that I hated. My life with Kasia... camping, road trips, garden, dog, cats, etc. Filmmaking info with a particular angle on how it would benefit participants in my event, which had grown rather drastically over the years.

I didn't eliminate politics from my social media engagements. It just shifted to interacting with political posts on friends' pages. If they were amenable, I'd make my thoughts known in the comments of what they posted. Argue about the things that mattered to me on someone else's profile as long as they permitted. I've had a small number of people ask me to knock it off, and I complied, gladly. I'm on their turf and want to respect their boundaries.

I've had to go after a couple of people who didn't like what I had to say on other friends' feeds and they barged onto my politics free profile with attacks. As much as I wanted to dig in and make them look foolish, I'd explain the rules of my social media feed, and that they could politely, and preferably quietly go fuck right off.

The 48 Hour Film Project has created a small amount of celebrity for me in the WA film community. Just enough that a couple of times a year, I'm stopped at a grocery store or somewhere similarly public and someone will say, "Hey! You're that 48 Hour Guy! I did it a few years back and had a blast!" I thank them and then give them the dates for the current year and ask them to participate again! Always working it!

I came late to the Twitter game. Luckily when I did, the toolset of FB groups and pages had advanced enough that I was able to link the Seattle 48HFP presence on Facebook to its corresponding Twitter presence. The advantage here is that I was able to create a personal presence for myself on Twitter where I could say whatever the fuck I wanted to without having potentially negative effects on my 48HFP work. I pick political fights all the time on Twitter now! As a result, I think I've discovered my "superpower". Making people look foolish and stupid in a very polite and rational fashion.

Anyway...

I'm writing again seriously now. Doing that very early 2000s thing of writing a blog. Writing a blog where I talk about the shit that I want to talk about. Politics, music, food, travel, movies, dogs, etc. etc. I share every post here to Facebook which then posts to Twitter.

I know most people in my FB circle aren't going to click through the links to this, so it's become my backdoor way of posting about whatever the fuck I want to on my personal Facebook presence. It's been kind of liberating.

And now Instagram... seriously... fuck Instagram. I want to write sentences, craft a story... not post a photo with a huge string of hashtags... and only from my phone.