Social Media Wasn't Built For Me

Social Media: Part One

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

At an artist’s talk at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, an audience member asked the two panelists (both women of color) how they used social media to promote their art. The first gave the standard response: it’s great, it helps me find an audience, etc. But what the second woman said stuck with me.

“It wasn’t built for people like me,” she said, after dropping the bombshell that..she didn’t use social media.

The second thing my publishing company said to me after upon buying my book, after congratulations, was “you’ll have to start using social media.” This was in 2009, when the publishing industry (like many industries) first realized they could shift the responsibility of marketing their products onto their creators. We could blog, tweet, post and, later, Instagram and TikTok our way to fame while they slashed their marketing budget.

And for some writers, obviously, it worked. Creators like Chuck Wendig and John Green are examples of people who blogged/vlogged their way into people’s hearts and minds. But most of us spent a lot of time on social media and didn’t see that translate into readers of our books. Maybe we weren’t as good writers and/or maybe we weren’t great at marketing ourselves. Oftentimes we came in a bit too late, and we were shouting into a sold-out circus. In very extreme cases, some of us even managed to use the social media that was supposed to make us to break our entire career.

In my case, I never loved social media. I did like elements of it, sometimes, or for a little while. I can be a show off, sure. And I did genuinely enjoy the very early days of Twitter when it was a lot of experts talking about their areas of expertise, and learning from each other (remember that???). But I’d always been deeply ambivalent about early social media, and had never had Friendster or MySpace, and I’d even refused to get a Facebook profile until I had to for my publisher.

I never really probed why. I just didn’t love it, the way I didn’t love moshing or festivals. So many people!

But sitting in that museum panel audience, hearing this very attuned human say, “It wasn’t built for me,” I felt my lil inner tuning fork start vibrating.

It wasn’t built for me.

Facebook, for example, was built (or possibly stolen?) by a nineteen-year-old white male at an elite college. But before he “built” (or stole?) FB, he built a site designed solely to rate the “hotness of women on campus.”

I can remember vividly being in high school and hearing from a male friend (a friend!) how I would be happy to know I rated highly on the “tweeter to woofer” scale that the boys had designed to rate their female classmates breast sizes. I asked, horrified, what *other* scales they used, and he refused to tell me, from which I could easily infer that I didn’t rate highly.

Kate Manne’s book Fatphobia discusses how men used sexual objectification and rating systems to dehumanize female peers, especially ones that are “threatening” (smarter, funnier, or “out of their league”). If you’re a woman, you already know this. Amd if you’re a woman of color, a queer woman, a fat woman, a tall woman, a woman who isn’t “hot” (by whatever random standards apply in the moment), a woman who IS “hot” (by whatever random standards apply in the moment), a woman who’s disabled, a woman born in the wrong gendered body, or any intersection of the above—you really know this.

So let us return to the fact that FB’s intellectual and spiritual progenitor was a ratings system for women’s bodies at a school where everyone is, at least theoretically, smart. Where they are in competition for the best jobs and the widest access to power in the nation. And where women weren’t allowed to enroll until 1945, and are now 51% of the student body. This isn’t a huge majority, but it is a majority. I wonder why a sophomore male felt the need to remind his classmates that, brains or not, they were really just their size or their tits or their legs or their buttocks or their facial symmetry?

I think about that, and then I think about “the comments.” You know what I mean by “the comments.” And if you don’t, if you’ve been living under a rock, please let me come live with you and also please take a moment to read the comments on any woman’s profile, who has any sort of public prominence.

All of this has been stewing in my mind. What am I getting from social media? What is it doing to me? What am I absorbing? For every genuinely good thing I see (an idea, a piece of art, a friend doing something cool), what else is infiltrating?

Do I really need to use it?

I want to explore this idea with you. I think I know the answer for myself, but I could be wrong. And I love to process through writing. So bear with me, and if you’re interested in this well, I’d love to hear from you. How has social media served you? Not served you? What do you think about it, or your relationship to it? Let me know.