For me, one of the biggest hallmarks of a poisoned place (which you didn't mention in your own list) is the pressure to NOT LEAVE THE BUBBLE. Don't educate yourself except in the approved ways. Don't venture abroad. To do so risks impurity and contamination, so you must only consume the CORRECT things. I once joked it's like diet culture.
Also, I too learned some social justice concepts from Tumblr... but it also kinda gave me a bunch of SHIT ideas about those very things too, which has at times made it harder to learn further! I've also been able to squeeze good information from truly heinous places; that doesn't mean those places were good.
I kinda quit social media years ago, and also had a meltdown a couple years back that led to me locking up the only social internet area I remained on: here. I felt a pressure to stay, for fear that if I didn't keep up, nobody would be interested in my work. In fact, the opposite has happened: instead of focusing on slapfights (which may or may not have use), I'm able to focus on other stuff, which is less glamorous but way more useful, like digitizing old books, digging up old citations, and cataloging plural stories. And people have stuck around, my stuff still gets spread, just now I have fewer popcorn-munchers eagerly waiting for me to hurl myself into bloodsport.
It's true, there isn't a hard line between "challenging but useful" and "poison," but part of detoxing, I'd argue, is figuring out where that line lies FOR YOU, and putting it into practice. Obviously there are people who CAN exist on social media without being a vibrating ball of tension! I'm just not one of them.
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Date: 2024-06-01 09:50 pm (UTC)Also, I too learned some social justice concepts from Tumblr... but it also kinda gave me a bunch of SHIT ideas about those very things too, which has at times made it harder to learn further! I've also been able to squeeze good information from truly heinous places; that doesn't mean those places were good.
I kinda quit social media years ago, and also had a meltdown a couple years back that led to me locking up the only social internet area I remained on: here. I felt a pressure to stay, for fear that if I didn't keep up, nobody would be interested in my work. In fact, the opposite has happened: instead of focusing on slapfights (which may or may not have use), I'm able to focus on other stuff, which is less glamorous but way more useful, like digitizing old books, digging up old citations, and cataloging plural stories. And people have stuck around, my stuff still gets spread, just now I have fewer popcorn-munchers eagerly waiting for me to hurl myself into bloodsport.
It's true, there isn't a hard line between "challenging but useful" and "poison," but part of detoxing, I'd argue, is figuring out where that line lies FOR YOU, and putting it into practice. Obviously there are people who CAN exist on social media without being a vibrating ball of tension! I'm just not one of them.