The end of an era
I am an elder millenial, born in 1981. I was there when social media was birthed. My gmail account was created when it was invite only. My Facebook account was created when you had to have a college email to join and I’ve seen social media platforms explode and then die. I didn’t really mourn the end of MySpace. Everyone had moved to Facebook, looking for more exclusivity and freedom from the tyranny of having to rank your friends and learn a bit of html to make your profile page pop. I joined Twitter in 2009, 3 years after I’d gotten married and a good while before I had my first child. I was an avid user.
Through Twitterchats I was able to meet colleagues in librarianship and other writers I admired. It was #DVPit organized by We Need Diverse Books that was responsible for me finding an agent after years of trying and getting only the smallest interest. I too, waited to see if I got superpowers on December 21st. Spoiler alert: I did not. But as soon as Elon took hold of the app and removed all the rules regarding speech, bots swelled and took over. Any Tom, Dick, or Adolf could get verified and there was no way to tell if you were speaking to a journalist or some 13 year old in his parent’s basement on Spring Break. It was over. Still, it took me years to finally delete my account.
I don’t think it will take me that long to get rid of Facebook. With Zuck’s recent announcement that they will adopt the same kind of moderation rules as Twitter ( I refuse to call it X) the app is as good as dead. Now comes the laborious task of downloading the baby pictures, and wedding announcements, making sure old classmates have my email address so that when I finally go dark I don’t completely disappear, but I think I’m on better footing than Gen Z and even the Boomer generation. I know how to exist without social media and I’m still in the world enough to pick up information elsewhere. What happens to people who are largely inside their homes? Retired people? People with reduced mobility?
I don’t know.
In any case, I’m not completely gone. You can find me where the skies are blue.