Prose Night at The Writing Life, 8 February 2025
I've been thinking a bit about online and offline life. Let's talk about it.
Hello, everyone.
For those not familiar with the lay of the land here at The Writing Life, I set aside my posts on the second weekend of the month for prose projects. By this, I mean the post could be just about any kind of writing (except poetry; you’ll see it here every fourth weekend of the month). It could be excerpts from some of my fiction works in progress, it could be original self-contained short stories or stories connected to my longer fiction. Often, they might be original essays having something connected (however tenuously) with writing.
It is the latter category that today’s piece falls under. I decided to write about the online world, the social media world, I appear to be tied to and yet wish to be separate from. I’ll try to make sense of everything in the end, trust me.
On the Issue of Social Media and Life and Writing
By Jason Liegois
The idea of me contemplating whether I need to spend so much time online is amusing to no end, ladies and gentlemen. At the start of this essay, I believe I need to state my circumstances and biases right from the beginning, because my experiences are much different from the millennials and those later generations who know nothing of life offline.
I am very much Generation X. I was born 30 March 1973, eight years before Ronald Reagan nearly lost his life to an assassin’s bullet. From what I observed, I was the last college student who received email and unlimited long distance phone minutes. I did not live with computers; computers were a thing that were trucked into our classroom on media carts and we had 10 minutes to mess around with them. We had no cell phones, no video links, to connect to people. We did it in the analog world, like in the series Stranger Things, or not at all. I occasionally feel like a relic in this era, and thus in my opinion, I think it could be useful for those who grew up staring at screens which told them what to think to hear from a point of view which did not have this experience.
People like us, people older than us, we need to write down how things were like for us, so people of future generations know there was a different way than the way they lived. There was a way beyond screens and apps and digitization and artificial intelligence of various levels doing the thinking for us. There was a way and there can be a different way than what there was1, but I’m not going to assume the way I think is the only way to think.
Got it straight? All right, we can continue.
What is Social Media Good For?
I’ve been on social media for a while, beginning on Facebook and wandering around on a few different sites since then. Wordpress (where I’ve been blogging for several years) is more of a blogging site, where Substack is now a hybrid of a blogging platform and a social media platform.
I have to say if I was not a writer at this point, I might not even be on social media, or at least my presence on social media would be dramatically restricted. This fact is directly tied to my youth and the opportunities afforded to people at that time (late 20th century).
When you wanted to write an essay or an opinion piece, you had to convince a newspaper or magazine publisher to run it. Perhaps you were a staff member or a guest writer, but you had to convince them to publish it. Then, you’d hope some people pick it up off the newsstand. Now all you do is type a few things, punch a few buttons, and your words are on the World Wide Web for everyone to see. Or not.
You had to convince publishers in New York to publish your book and give you cash for it and they would take care of all the publicity and advertising and everything. But that was only if they thought you were a good writer. Now everyone has the chance to publish their own books, even though they have to do all the marketing and advertising and not all of those books are good or even written by humans. And the long and the short of it is, social media is one of the most inexpensive ways of getting the word out about what you are writing and what you are about.
I mean, social media is good for some other things. If you want to keep in touch with your family, old friends, or school classmates, it’s a good way to do that. You can do it automatically online and not have to muck around with old traditions like class reunions and the like2. You can find people who have similar interests in entertainment or hobbies. It’s good for finding those funny pictures with kooky sayings (Memes, I remember them being called) and saving them or sharing them online.
I’ve come to the conclusion it’s pretty much useless for anything else.
There are many good writers on Substack and other places who have been talking about the decline of social media over the past several years. I might have written one of those myself when I decided to get off Twitter, for example.
Saying Goodbye to Twitter
You might have noticed that I don’t write too much about politics here. I’m not sure when or where I mentioned it before on here, but I’ve made a conscientious decision to focus this Substack (and my other blog page, Liegois Media) on, as I put it, writing and the writing life.
Again, not to get into politics, but there are at least a few different reasons for this as I rely on the analysis of others.
It turns out business truly do not like to be regulated in any meaningful way. This has always been true of businesses, but as tech companies were relatively young among the world’s industries, there might have been a thought they were different. They are now being supportive of leaders who promise not to regulate them, and their actions reflect this.
There appears to be a general decline in the quality of user experiences, especially regarding older platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. When viewers log on, they seem to see advertisements and posts from others rather than the people they follow.
There’s a larger amount of AI-generated material and bots online. At a certain point, I wonder when the bots are going to outnumber the actual people online, and I wonder if it is already happening.
Why is all of this happening? To quote the great Italian philosopher and footballer Giorgio Chinaglia, who used this phrase to explain why anything happened in the world of football:
It’s the money, you morons.
From what I understand, the companies in charge of these social media sites are doing everything they can to make money from their operations no matter what the cost. It’s their companies, they have the right to run things the way they want. But that doesn’t mean we agree with it.
For me, it means I don’t trust everything I see on social media. I go to actual news sites and actual journalists for my news, and not random Facebook places. I only engage with social media for given purposes, not for self-gratification or a dopamine boost.
It also means I try to connect to real people in person rather than people I only meet across a laptop or a phone screen.
Attention to all scammers, marketers, and assorted individuals online: I am not interested in your services unless I have met you IRL and/or I have investigated you enough to feel halfway confident in your services to solicit you myself. I will not accept solicitations or you reaching out to me. You will either be made fun of or told to buy my books instead. Then I’ll probably block you.
I am finding I feel much personal satisfaction with interacting with real people in the real world than many of my online interactions. Today I went down to my local bookstore, Bent Oak Books, whose owner Danette I’ve gotten to know well over the past few months. I met with Keokuk author Bree Moore, who was having an author signing down there. We met and realized we must have run into each other at a previous author’s event somewhere here in Iowa. I got on her email list and we promised to keep in touch.
If you’re into fantasy writing, you might want to check her web site too. Now that I met her, I’m looking forward to doing it myself.
Obligatory Panhandling
Go to the links on the side if you are reading this on a desktop/laptop or the links on my profile to find out about my first book, the journalism thriller The Holy Fool: A Journalist’s Revolt, as well as the first book in my The Yank Striker series, The Yank Striker: a Footballer’s Beginning. Oh, and did I mention I put out my first book of poetry? It’s called The Flow and the Journey, and it’s centered around themes of life on the river and traveling. You can find out more about it here (and where to find it for purchase).
I love it if you are signed up for my free subscription, but I would love it if you signed up for a paid one. The monthly rate is the lowest I can put it ($5 per month) but my yearly rate of $35 is a steal at less than three/fifths the monthly rate.
Now, if you are interested in supporting me but can’t quite afford a full subscription, I am now on Venmo. If you are interested in a donation of whatever you can provide, you can just send whatever you can afford. Just click the button below.
This is the only time where I’ll rant on about “It was better back in my days.” There’s plenty of evidence this was a thing centuries or even millennia previously.
I’ve gone to several high school class reunions in the past, but I’m beginning to wonder what the point of them is at the moment.
Loved it Jason