Vol. 34 of Thursday Third Things
I'm back baby!!! With more horrors from the interwebs
Did You Marry Your Mom Or Your Dad?
This was the heart of the question of this essay (or so I believe) and of course I sat with my own 9-year relationship and wondered if J was more like my mom or my dad and also if I was more like HIS mom or dad. And quite frankly I didn’t love the exercise.
I don’t know if we necessarily marry someone similar to one of our parents, but I do think we often find ourselves attracted to people who have an uncanny ability to poke at old wounds and unknowingly force us to ask ourselves, “is that healed yet?” (And wow, how is it that the answer is almost always “NOPE!”)
No, I’m Not Always Available
A friend recently came to visit and shared her location with me so that she didn’t have to keep sending me updates on her arrival time as she stopped along the drive to hike and visit friends. I didn’t even know this was a thing phones could do (beyond Find My iPhone) and throughout the day periodically watched as her little icon got closer and closer to Grand Junction. It was fascinating — and gave me assurance when I checked in around 3pm and saw she was still several hours away that I had time to squeeze in a bike ride and cook dinner — but it also felt a little freaky to pull up her map and too easily know, “Ah, she’s hiking St. Mary’s Glacier right now,” or “hmmm, she went the wrong way for a bit in Glenwood Canyon, wonder what that was about?”
J and I have never tracked each other’s locations, not because we’re on some pedestal of pure trust and acceptance, but because it just seems really fucking weird to need to know where the other one is all the time. For example, J went leaf peeping this morning, named a couple of routes he might take which was too much for my overloaded brain meaning I promptly forgot which route he was actually taking, and that was six hours ago. He’s still not home, I don’t know when he’ll be home, I’ve got no idea where he is, I might leave for scuba class before he gets back, and maybe he’s actually visiting his secret second family he’s somehow hidden from me all this time in which case, good for him. I sure as shit couldn’t manage that much extra work.
24/7 location tracking (not one off travel-related moments, I kinda get that) seems to me like another way of being constantly available, ensuring neither you nor anyone else ever needs to have a single millisecond of uncomfortability not knowing where someone else is or why you’re left waiting on them. I don’t like it for the same reasons I don’t like that certain apps will now tell you when others are online and when they were last active. I don’t like text read receipts. I don’t like anything that leaves a digital trail of activity. Not because I’m ghosting people or doing anything nefarious (or am I???) but mostly because I’m hard enough on myself as it is when it comes to shame and social obligations that I really don’t need a digital monitoring tool broadcasting to everyone I love exactly how I spend every moment of my day so that THEY can decide if it was time well spent or not. My main complaint with social media and most digital tools of the 21st century is that they’ve created this near-constant need to explain ourselves and dear god I am not wasting my one wild and precious life explaining myself to mere acquaintances who should never have had this kind of access to me in the first place.
“I used to feel pathetic for feeling anxious about these features, but now that I’m older I’m wondering, what is the actual point of them? Other than to stoke constant anxiety about why someone isn’t replying, or guilt that we haven’t gotten back to them yet? Give me one good reason why it’s useful to know that someone was Typing and then stopped. It’s completely unnecessary.”
On Assignment
To this day I still believe getting my Master’s in journalism was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Not because it was academically rigorous (lol, it was not), but because the culture of journalism and journalists is so incredibly toxic (I’m sorry my still wonderful journalist friends — but holy shit your profession is awful).
I believe I started souring on this particular field of study a mere few weeks into the start of my program when the lengthy discussions of, “Yes, but is it journalism,” began during my $1,000 credit hour class time and one professor claimed he didn’t vote to ensure he was truly unbiased (BARF) and therefore holier than all of us. My writing was nominated for a Pushcart Prize that year and no one cared because it wasn’t jOuRnAlIsM. And I swear I was going to have an aneurysm if I saw one more braggadocious hashtag #OnAssignment from one of my peers while out “reporting” on some jam band playing at Red Rocks.
In contrast, let the record show that my grouchiness and side-eye knows no bounds and that I ALSO do not particularly care for influencers or content creators, but I do love how angry they are making journalists who are losing ground despite spending long hours arguing over which “lede” fundamentally shifted the nature of a story forever (reader’s note: no lede has ever done such a thing).
“The way creators are being mocked and belittled by so-called "established" journalists and observers online is nothing short of disgraceful. The entitlement, the arrogance, and the gatekeeping is appalling. While the viciousness of these attacks is upsetting, the backlash is not surprising. This is the same kind of protectionist behavior that has been happening in the media world for decades, as many invested in institutional power structures lash out amidst their dwindling influence. (I wrote about this last year for WaPo and extensively in my book). From the first blogger to receive White House press credentials in 2005, to fashion influencers being seated front row at Dolce & Gabbana in 2009, to this recent convention, creators have been infiltrating and upending traditional media structures for nearly 25 years.”
*One more quick note on this quote: Isn’t it just FUCKING IRONIC that these same journalists who claim to be “a voice for the people” and are “demanding democracy” are the same people upholding institutional power structures that give them a particular kind of gravitas over every other writer and creator?
First They Came For Our Gun Emojis
Don’t worry everyone. I know you’ve been having an existential crisis about it, but you can now get a REAL GUN emoji on X! No more Apple water pistols 🔫. No, no. WE’RE BRINGING IN THE BIG GUNS. We’ve got hunger and diseases and climate threats galore, but have no fear, one of the world’s wealthiest white men has ensured that we can send pictures of semi-automatic pistols to each other on a social media platform. DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN SAVED.
“For years, emoji have been transforming from a sophisticated, powerful visual language capable of diverse expression into just a format for sending pictures that conform to the emoji visual style. To which I say, 🚮.”
\\~*BRB*~//
I would give anything, ANYTHING to be able to recover my AIM account (that’s AOL Instant Messenger for you mere babes) and see all the horribly cringey away messages I left so that my friends knew I was around but no longer permitted to tie up the phone line.
And while the away messages were just the most embarrassing thing any of us ever did in our whole lives, I’d never considered the fact that we no longer need them because we are now online 24/7.
“But gradually MSN messenger made way for Facebook, and we started oversharing and showing off on Twitter and Instagram instead. There was no more ‘afk’ (away from keyboard) when you were carrying one around in your pocket all the time, and no need to employ MSN’s ‘nudge’ function when you knew that the object of your affections would have to look at their phone soon one way or the other. The use of ‘brb’ petered out like your interest in that boy from the year above once he put another girl’s name in his MSN bio. g2g was sent off to the internet’s graveyard to fade into obscurity alongside Habbo Hotel and all your Limewire downloads which were meant to be the latest Razorlight single but which were inexplicably all clips of Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” speech.”
