That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours
YMMV, but my quality of life increased in ways I can't even begin to describe by severing all the dozens or perhaps hundreds of shallow connections social media was encouraging me to cling to.
With the saved time and energy, I've been able to cultivate far fewer-- but much deeper and more (mutually) fulfilling-- connections with those who are _actually_ important.
I don't miss any of that. Those connections were beyond shallow, and weren't adding anything positive or useful to my life.
I think this advice is generally harmful to networking as someone grows, which is vital in today's society
What I see over years is that, especially in developers online groups, any usual and normal way of socializing is stigmatized. I remember reading comments about how lazy people who socialize with friends are and how we are better if we code every evening. I remember people being proud about spending christmas coding supposedly being superior to the rest of the family that is socializing.
Now we are proud if we remove ourselves from social media.
It is always the same - however other people socialize is wrong, they are stupid and lazy. We remove ourselves, because it is superior to not participate. Eventually those places die out or change, but we do not like the new places either.
And in each iteration, we expect other people to do work of keeping and managing relationships while feeling superior over not doing that.
The role social media plays is in encouraging large numbers of superficial relationships, rather than a small handful of deep ones. It stands to reason: I don't need facebook to keep in touch with a dozen close family and friends. I can do that perfectly well in person, or over phone calls/messages. What the various social media apps did was kill the close circle of friends in favor of having 1000s of followers and turn everyone into a one-way broadcaster.
Developers are not typical of regular people. They're, basically by design, outliers.
You make it sound as if something was lost, maybe recently. In the grand scheme of things I'm not that old (41) but I don't even remember how that would have worked out, because I wasn't old enough to have people's parents die before social media, at least in my social circles. Yes, of course you'd hear about grandparents and such from your immediate friends but that's usually a handful and people would maybe not be shaken as much. I agree with you that social media doesn't have to mean "blasting it to hundreds or thousands of followers", but it's a thing where I actually liked Facebook. Not only techies, and getting enough updates from people who are not your closest friends that you have things to talk about (as in reference) when you met again (or talked synchronously, or privately).
You are not characteristic for the population at large (neither am I, don't feel sad :-) ).
It makes me really sad if it's true that people assume that when they post big, difficult stuff like that on social media, anyone who doesn't see it doesn't care about them. Even for people who are active on social media, the feed and post promotion algorithms make it fairly likely that a decent chunk of people who really should see that post might not see it.
That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.
The aggressiveness of your response is absurd. No, it was not seen as a mental health illness at all.
When you expect personal one to one call, it is equivalent of removing yourself from other social structures in the past. You can do it, but your relationships will weaken and eventually die out. Just like it happened in the past.
You read the obituaries in your local paper, “oh, so and so has passed away”, you don’t know them particularly well, might or might not go to the funeral.
Posting it to social media, then thinking if whoever doesn’t contact you to… what? “Sorry for your loss”? “My condolences” … hurts your relationship with that person?
Call me old fashioned, but…
Is it narcissistic in here, or is it just me?
Technology changes the world around us.
Apart from phoning the airline or airport and checking whether the flight was on time. We used to do that all the time 30+ years ago.
20 years ago you could check on websites IIRC.
Instant messaging and group chat, I’d argue, are distinct services / protocols / products vis-à-vis social media.
Strained analogies are weird. I like to call them sieved analogies, the other definition of strained.
I strained your analogy and threw out the dross.
There was another discussion where this came up on HN recently, but people get quite emotionally defensive when you start scrutinizing their reasons for staying on social media, so it is hard to have an honest conversation about it without a bunch of hyperbolic takes.
In my experience, it was designed to be addictive, partly by using our own behavior against us and partly by vindicating the desire for attention. The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic, as it turns out, but we are so steeped in it that's there's no chance of purifying those waters, again.
To your point, yes, there was some aspect of this back in the day, what with obituaries in newspapers being out there to both acknowledge that a person lived, but also put out the call to any old acquaintances to come say goodbye, but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement. We have to ask ourselves if that is a socially and mentally healthy position to be in, which is an admittedly scary question.
Do you have a reference for the claim that the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen By Proxy (or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) once included broadcast-type notices when a family member dies? The DSM-IV would have been in effect 20 years ago, and while version 5 doesn't have that in its warning signs, I guess it could have changed from the previous version?
We got a real pot, meet kettle situation here. It is absolutely wild to suggest that doing something standard like arranging for an obituary in the local newspaper would be viewed as a sign of mental illness.
But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news.
So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
And you would have to understand socialization if you wanted to know why people published life events to the newspaper - births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc.
Not everything in the world is for your bestest friends. It’s OK to not have close friends.
I very much would think your parents would expect that of their children.
>I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them
It's particularly the people in your parents life you should inform, not necessarily the people in your life.
Don't forget that your social media network is not the same as your parent's social media network (if at all they use it).
Nobody can expect that everyone is on social media, let alone a specific platform. You typically tell your family and some close friends and they will spread the word.
and yet people died quite often before social media; what did we do then?
If the realtionship is built upon the foundation of social media, it's actually not that strong, absent social media. We'll be fine.
Imagine deleting your email and telephone in 1999 and saying "if they were really my friend, they would drive/fly to my house and talk to me".
Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
