Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on. I asked them why they didn’t tell me and they were confused. They said the posted it on social media. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know a lack of social media meant that I have lost touch with old acquaintances completely. I have a few close friends and that’s it.
Maybe that’s an ok tradeoff to make, but it’s worth knowing that before getting into it.
This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them.
I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
What does this mean?
> The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic
I know about one or two people who does this. And it's far away from an obituary.
I'm not quite sure I get what you a saying. I just meant in my upbringing it was quite normal to share publicly when someone died. And they still do it today.
Apologies if my wording was too vague. I am using 'Self-aggrandizing' to mean a high exhibition of self-importance, or to put it another way, advertising one's self in a way that makes minor events or details seem bigger than they are. I am using 'competitive social engagement' as an alternative phrase to "Keeping up with the Joneses" which illustrates comparing yourself to your neighbors in terms of status, wealth, moral fiber, etc.
The invention of Social Media propelled us into extreme versions of these two very-human aspects of our psychology, which I believe to be both dangerous and ill-fated.
My intention was not to attack in any way, I just thought your reference to obituaries was an interesting link to our past prior to social media that was worth exploring and comparing. In a way, we can think of our Facebook profile as an extended obituary since that data is all accessible after we die. In fact, I am experiencing this on Instagram, having just lost a friend on New Year's Day and sitting down to peruse his old Instagram posts for the happy memories therein. Your comment just got me thinking, so I decided to expound on it.
added: I should maybe clarify that I'm of an age that remembers what the world was like before Social Media and the Internet as we know it today. The differences when I compare those two halves of my life tend to be alarmingly drastic, which is something that warrants examination, to me, since many HN readers might be a bit too young to remember, so from their perspective, Social Media habits are likely more normalized.
I also had no social media in my upbringing, a bit of ICQ via dial up though. Got an Facebook account and smartphone way later compared to my peers.