So I've been thinking a lot about how difficult it has been to 'be' on the internet for the past few weeks...it's like, worse than usual and explicitly worse when it feels like you're the trending topic of discussion. My feeds have been a barrage of people posting reports and photographs that all center around protests, new laws, hate crimes, etc, all which talk of people that look like me. It felt incredibly overwhelming and sort of emotionally paralyzed me for a bit. The immobility forced me to think more critically about the ways I interact with things in cyberspace, if I ever wanted to be functional and 'productive' online.
There's this weird thing about cybersociality that makes me feel like I'm missing out on something if I'm not plugged in for a few hours. Like, if I didn't see some obnoxious meme that I was tagged in or if one of my pages got a few likes and I wasn't there to see them roll in or something. It's bizarre and makes absolutely no sense, but there's this thing about social media that radically alters the way I conceptualize friendship networks/social epistimologies, as well as my conceptions of time and space. I haven't critically unpacked that yet, but it's something that I can't quite put my finger on--perhaps it's the friend counts and the likes and the numbers--the quantification of social networks.
Also, random people I haven't talked to in forever started to message and check in on me, and I was so confused because I wasn't sure what affect to pull out of of a bag to validate their concerns. I hadn't spoken to most of these people in years. It's interesting to see how different political realities can shape virtual social practices, I don't think they thought of me every time I was randomly selected at an airport security line...but the context of collective politicization, I guess, confronted them with parts of a Muslim's reality?
There's this weird thing about cybersociality that makes me feel like I'm missing out on something if I'm not plugged in for a few hours. Like, if I didn't see some obnoxious meme that I was tagged in or if one of my pages got a few likes and I wasn't there to see them roll in or something. It's bizarre and makes absolutely no sense, but there's this thing about social media that radically alters the way I conceptualize friendship networks/social epistimologies, as well as my conceptions of time and space. I haven't critically unpacked that yet, but it's something that I can't quite put my finger on--perhaps it's the friend counts and the likes and the numbers--the quantification of social networks.
Also, random people I haven't talked to in forever started to message and check in on me, and I was so confused because I wasn't sure what affect to pull out of of a bag to validate their concerns. I hadn't spoken to most of these people in years. It's interesting to see how different political realities can shape virtual social practices, I don't think they thought of me every time I was randomly selected at an airport security line...but the context of collective politicization, I guess, confronted them with parts of a Muslim's reality?
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