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?”
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.”
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.)