The weird thing about Mastodon is that I’ve internalized a pretty finely tuned sense of who my Twitter audience is and how they’ll respond to things, but here I have no clue. It really feels like 2007 around here in that sense. “I don’t know…a dog photo? Is that something?”
Which, in turn, always reminds me of W.E.B. Dubois’s notion of a “double consciousness:
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/
(Not, the be clear, that I am in any way comparing the experience of a social network user to that of an oppressed minority, but I think there is something to the idea that social networks also force us develop a kind of double consciousness.)
@buzz Had I a beverage, I'd have spat it out with hearty laughter
I reference this essay a lot:
“To become occupied by a social network is to internalize its gaze. It is to forever carry a doubled view of both your own mind and the platform’s.”
https://reallifemag.com/auto-format/