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.
quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours
YMMV, but my quality of life increased in ways I can't even begin to describe by severing all the dozens or perhaps hundreds of shallow connections social media was encouraging me to cling to.
With the saved time and energy, I've been able to cultivate far fewer-- but much deeper and more (mutually) fulfilling-- connections with those who are _actually_ important.
What I see over years is that, especially in developers online groups, any usual and normal way of socializing is stigmatized. I remember reading comments about how lazy people who socialize with friends are and how we are better if we code every evening. I remember people being proud about spending christmas coding supposedly being superior to the rest of the family that is socializing.
Now we are proud if we remove ourselves from social media.
It is always the same - however other people socialize is wrong, they are stupid and lazy. We remove ourselves, because it is superior to not participate. Eventually those places die out or change, but we do not like the new places either.
And in each iteration, we expect other people to do work of keeping and managing relationships while feeling superior over not doing that.
You make it sound as if something was lost, maybe recently. In the grand scheme of things I'm not that old (41) but I don't even remember how that would have worked out, because I wasn't old enough to have people's parents die before social media, at least in my social circles. Yes, of course you'd hear about grandparents and such from your immediate friends but that's usually a handful and people would maybe not be shaken as much. I agree with you that social media doesn't have to mean "blasting it to hundreds or thousands of followers", but it's a thing where I actually liked Facebook. Not only techies, and getting enough updates from people who are not your closest friends that you have things to talk about (as in reference) when you met again (or talked synchronously, or privately).
It makes me really sad if it's true that people assume that when they post big, difficult stuff like that on social media, anyone who doesn't see it doesn't care about them. Even for people who are active on social media, the feed and post promotion algorithms make it fairly likely that a decent chunk of people who really should see that post might not see it.
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.
The aggressiveness of your response is absurd. No, it was not seen as a mental health illness at all.
When you expect personal one to one call, it is equivalent of removing yourself from other social structures in the past. You can do it, but your relationships will weaken and eventually die out. Just like it happened in the past.
Technology changes the world around us.
Do you have a reference for the claim that the diagnostic criteria for Munchausen By Proxy (or Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another) once included broadcast-type notices when a family member dies? The DSM-IV would have been in effect 20 years ago, and while version 5 doesn't have that in its warning signs, I guess it could have changed from the previous version?
We got a real pot, meet kettle situation here. It is absolutely wild to suggest that doing something standard like arranging for an obituary in the local newspaper would be viewed as a sign of mental illness.
But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news.
So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
I very much would think your parents would expect that of their children.
>I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them
It's particularly the people in your parents life you should inform, not necessarily the people in your life.
Don't forget that your social media network is not the same as your parent's social media network (if at all they use it).
Nobody can expect that everyone is on social media, let alone a specific platform. You typically tell your family and some close friends and they will spread the word.
and yet people died quite often before social media; what did we do then?
If the realtionship is built upon the foundation of social media, it's actually not that strong, absent social media. We'll be fine.
Imagine deleting your email and telephone in 1999 and saying "if they were really my friend, they would drive/fly to my house and talk to me".
The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all.
The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.
I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day.
There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually no effort but can lead to meaningful interactions down the road.
Fully recognising that you said "IMO", I'll say that keeping up with acquaintances and people from the past is normal in my culture. Social media helps to make that more direct and easier to manage than the gossipy grapevine of yore.
What's normal depends on your culture and context, of course, and I suspect that's not true in yours — but it is in mine, so ditching something like Facebook is just out of the question for me and many people whose cultures place a heavy emphasis on those connections between people.
The middle ground for me has been to check Facebook less and less, accelerated by the algorithm delivering me fewer life updates and more slop reposted from reddit.
It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch.
I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".
Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.
We have a finite amount of time and energy to maintain connections with people. Even shallow connections eat into that. I'd rather spend that time and energy on deeper connections. And while it's customary to say "but sure, I guess other people have different views on this, so to each their own", I... well, I honestly believe it's unhealthy to obsessively try to maintain all these sorts of shallow connections. I think this is a part of why I read about how so many people are lonely these days and have trouble forming friendships and keeping them going.
I rekindled a friendship with an old friend when I realized he was visiting the same foreign country as I was. Funny enough his wife is a mutual college friend of ours whom he had lost touch with but only met again after reconnecting on social media. I also reconnected with her through my friend.
um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?
Apparently someone from that part of the family had posted it on facebook but she didn't notice it as she do not visit it every day.
For most people, that is arguably currently Facebook.
