Fauxscial Media and the Last House on the Street

In December of 2018, I logged into Twitter to find a message waiting for me in my inbox.

I didn’t know the sender. If we had ever interacted, I hadn’t recalled the exchange. It was just a message in my inbox from a name I didn’t recognize. At the time, I got a lot of those. Up until Elon Musk bought Twitter, I had always “left my DMs open” – meaning, anyone could send me a message whether it be friend or troll, earnest or illegitimate.

That decision came with consequences. I got a fair amount of junk, some hate mail, and an occasional threat. I got more trash than treasure. It would have been easy to close my inbox to save myself the headache, but I left it open nonetheless. To close it would be to conclude that nothing sufficiently good could come from being reachable to other people.

The day that message arrived, I wasn’t seeing much of the good in anything to be honest.

My father had died just over a month earlier. While the two of us had been long estranged and I considered our relationship a chapter long closed, the aftermath added some weight to a load I was already struggling to carry.

After eight years of incrementally cutting everything that could be cut from my expenses, I was so hopelessly ground down by that struggle, I couldn’t even remember what it was like to not feel asphyxiated by stress. In the weeks after my father’s death, it seemed like I might get out from under the boulder. I learned that I was, surprisingly, in his will as one of the beneficiaries of his estate. Suddenly, the unimaginable was… maybe possible? Was I actually going to escape my choking financial pressure?

No, I wasn’t. A week later, I learned that what I had been told had not been quite right.

In the space between, for a brief moment, I thought my long estranged father in death, might have bailed me out of a hole I had only fallen into by trying to not be like him.

After realizing that wasn’t the case – that I hadn’t been saved, that there would be no salvation - I was despondent in a way I hadn’t been before. Just crushed. It was like being shipwrecked and desperately clinging to a lone plank and then seeing a rescue plane approach… before flying away. It ain’t coming back and you know that. It’s worse than had you never seen the plane.

In the depths of that – and I mean depths, just the lowest of lows – I received the message I mentioned above.

It was from someone who followed me. They were writing to say that they had the feeling I was struggling and they hoped I was okay. In it was a gift code for a place that delivered craft beers.

It was so unexpected, so out of the blue. It just seemed so… kind.

That happened on December 16, 2018.

Over five years ago.

I remember it sharply. I just choked up writing about it. It is still right there. Visceral, present.

A few years later, I had a chance to be on the other side of an exchange like that.

A friend of mine had been struggling mightily under her own set of burdens. A kind stranger had bought her something, a Christmas gift, but not for her. For her autistic son. It was all he had wanted and therefore all she had wanted too. I got to be the bearer of the good news. When I told her what was headed her way, she broke down just sobbing and then said through tears “Do you know what this is? This is light.”

Yes, I know light.

I have had people shine some on me when I needed it.

I know that feeling, that darkness, and how profound it makes the gift of even a few rays.

I was on Twitter for a long, rough stretch through particularly toxic times. I received so much trash in my DMs, so much hostility and negativity...but I also received some light both when I most needed it and many times after.

Having now opened with some fairly solid “show, don’t tell,” I am now going to seamlessly segue into explaining what led to this entry. Oh, it has been a journey of many edits.

It started as a rant about something seemingly minor. The social media platform, Threads, announced they would not be adding a direct messaging feature. That bummed me out... but made other people happy… which then made me mad. Their rejoicing aggrieved me and left me with no choice but to conclude that they were big dumb stupidheads.

I could do 1,000 words on even medium-sized dumb stupidheads. Big ones? Oh, get thee to a safe distance, Mike has some lacerating to do. So I wrote a fairly lacerating first draft.Much to my chagrin though, I just sort of lost the yen for evisceration.

I find that somewhat troubling.

Time and age seem to be reducing my trademark prickly nature to something damnably less puncturing. I am a fucking porcupine. I did not ask for that. If it keeps up, I am going to end up a damn housecat. Aloof and inscrutable tops. Not even close to a damn porcupine. That would be ruinous to my brand.

I’m digressing here but the point is that I wrote a first draft heavy on my aggrievement at the opposing side of a bicker about direct messaging.

Ultimately, I just couldn’t get the draft all the way “there” because somewhere deep down inside, I knew it was all surface water with no view of the spring. It was about what spilled out.

I cared because of what lay way down in the aquifer:

For some reason, we call platforms like Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon “social media” but they really aren’t all that social in practice.

On Twitter for example, 90% of the posts come from 10% of the accounts. Most accounts don’t post anything at all… and most also don’t engage at all... They read. They eat alone in the cafeteria and leave.

Among the minority who do engage, some will ‘like’ some things; a subset of them will also ‘share’ posts; and an even smaller subset will sometimes ‘reply’. One layer deeper is an almost nonexistent population; users who engage in actual exchanges with others. That pop. Is microscopic. Even among the population that replies to message, very few actually engage in anything approximating even a conversation fragment. Most do little more than hit and run with a comment in passing.

That is just the nature of “social conversation platforms” like Twitter.

There is very little ‘social’ about them - and there is almost no ‘conversation’.

Ironically, if you asked users whether they agreed, they would give contradictory answers depending on what specifically you asked. Ask if they have meaningful social interactions, most users would say no. Ask if using a platform like Twitter makes them feel at least somewhat connected to people they follow and like, many would say yes.

That phenomenon – feeling a connection to someone known only through distant, limited observation rather than interaction - is called a ‘parasocial relationship’. The term came about in the 1950s to describe one of the social effects of television.

With TV came this weird phenomenon where viewers felt like they knew the people they saw regularly not just through television but personally.

The same phenomenon occurs on social media. People feel like they get a sense of someone through observation absent contact or interaction.

That in and of itself is not bad.

The problem with ‘parasocial relationships’ on social media isn’t that they aren’t relationships; it’s that they aren’t social. There is no mutuality, no exchange. There is only a provider and a consumer with the latter eating in silence and coming and going without leaving a trace. When you combine the dynamics described above re: usage and engagement, the net result is that the vast majority of social media users don’t interact at all and develop, at best, only parasocial connections to others.

They basically achieve nothing more social than watching TV… on a “social” media platform.

Engagement is what puts the ‘social’ in ‘social media’… It is the primary means of forming human connections on social media.

The thing that struck me about the opposition to DMs was what it said about the people opposed.

They’re on social media but they don’t talk to anyone. Not 1:1 at least. Not ever. They are in the equivalent of the world’s largest running social and at no time during their attendance have they ever wanted to actually say something to someone. At no time have they had someone say something to them which they valued.

That seems sad to me. It seems like a failure to capitalize on an opportunity which doesn’t just deprive them of a benefit but actually contributes to an erosion affecting all of us.

People are losing touch with each other, with humanity, and the phenomenon of sliding right past each other on “social media” without the faintest of interactions is making it worse. It is masking a growing detachment via the illusion of proximity. Strangers silent on an elevator are still strangers. Distant friends are still friends. The vast majority of people on social media are strangers on an elevator without no interest in making eye contact. That has a cost.

If you are an elevator-rider – if you aren’t an “engager” - this isn’t a judgment or indictment. It is perfectly legal to take the ‘social’ out of ‘social media’ and just be a passive reader. However, I think the effect versus the effect of the alternative bears some thought.

When you click ‘like’ on something, you don’t just signal something to the post’s author. You also inform the algorithm of what you see as worthy of that effort small effort of yours. You teach it what earned that tiny spark of your energy. And that spark allows it to not just better select things you might care about; it begins to pencil in faint lines between infinite nodes on a social graph just waiting to be yours.

It brings people closer to you…

While you may not sense it or see it or realize it, engaging in any way is an act of community-building. It is adding a microwatt of light. Without it, there are only people broadcasting in the dark to an audience listening but unseen.

Engagement of any kind is at least somewhat social; and at the high end of the engagement spectrum are direct messages.

For us non-digital natives, it’s worth mentioning that DMs aren’t just a different channel than texts and emails; they are a different medium. They work differently. They are more disposable, transient. They go into inboxes which are often overloaded. They don’t carry the same expectation of a reply or obligation to offer one. If none comes, a sender can’t read into why. The assumption has to be that the message might not have even be seen.

Direct messages are things offered for the offering of them. Things sent without expectation.

Sometimes they go into the abyss. And sometimes they land in someone’s inbox on a random December 16^th when they were just what the person needed.

I have used DMs a lot over the years. I have sent messages to people whose music I liked or whose article I appreciated. I have reached out to people who I saw were struggling or who had suffered a tragedy or loss. I have sent people messages just to say I appreciate their work. I have sent many that went without a reply. I don’t remember any of the non-responders off the top of my head because they weren’t written for the response.

I could have just replied to all of those people publicly under some post – and I often did that too – but a DM in and of itself says something. It says “I see you… and it was important to me that you knew that.”

In my earlier drafts of this entry, I talked about the many deeply personal DMs I have received over the years. Some have been so intensely private, they have left me humbled that the person felt safe enough with me to share them. Some contained things people had never told anyone else or felt they couldn’t tell anyone now. Most were about burdens long carried, heavy things, wounds suffered and then borne unhealed. And some were so very much the opposite. Casual exchanges for the fun of it. Messages to share a laugh or recommendation or tidbit. Gossip, like the former Megyn Kelly staffers who wrote to tell me what an insufferable asshole she was even off camera.

All were social connections. Not parasocial. Social.

Now, I am not a typical social media user. I am not representative. I have an absurdly large and complicated digital footprint. On my phone alone, I have 17 different ways to communicate with people.

Seventeen. One-seven.

I have seven social media apps, four messaging apps, two video chat apps, three email addresses, and a phone. Across the lot of them, I have fourteen inboxes. It is an absurd and maddening surplus. It is overwhelming, paralyzing, too much. I can’t keep up with my communications. I have long ago given up even trying. But I am not typical.

Your average social media user has it at least somewhat easier. They have less clutter. Messages to them get seen more.

Right now, there is likely someone you feel like you ‘know’ by virtue of having seen them on the public side of social media either through their posts or comments. They are someone you feel an affinity for or appreciate or feel a connection to... and yet, those feelings have cast no light. Maybe change that. Reach out and tell them.

Not someone who is already in a large spotlight. Someone who isn’t.

Not me or someone like me. Someone who doesn’t draw as much attention.

Tell them of the thing you value about them whatever it may be.

When we see others and they see us, the world gets a little less dark… especially for those who really need the warmth of someone else’s lantern.

Connections are light.

No matter what else becomes of this year, if one of the outcomes is me someday hearing from someone that this post was the catalyst to them engaging more, connecting more, and having benefited from that, it will have been a good year.

We are still early in January. Now is a good time for this:

This year, let us wire fast one to another, person to person, pole to pole. That is how you bring light to even the very last house.

We could all use the light.