I.
I am only occasionally on social media anymore, and usually then the-website-formerly-known-as-Twitter. I’ve missed a good amount of the discourse about its demise (this feels fine), but I did stumble upon an essay called "What Do We Want From the Bookish Internet?" (via, probably,[1] a newsletter, which the writer I think fairly points out, is also not the most good means of promoting discussion). I won’t summarize the article (it’s short enough), but it raises some interesting questions:
What I want is a bookish internet that feels like [the pre-social blog days]. But how do you have that without people giving up so much of their time? How do you have that in a post-everything-is-monetized internet? How do you have that in an internet that in some corners has fully pivoted to video? How do you have that when we have been so thoroughly trained to try to be funny in less than 280 characters?
I’ve never been a particularly good online literary citizen. I’ve often seen Twitter threads and had to google them (or ask my more online literary friends about them). Partially, I’m sure, it’s the prose-writer’s snobbishness (or anxiety) about literary communities (cue: the poets always have more fun); partially, I’m sure, it’s that I’ve got other things that demand or more readily entice my attention (sometimes, even I do my job). But I do, did (?), like knowing it was out there, that there was some discourse happening somewhere.
I wonder, though, about how our expectations maybe have changed around that. We’re all so painfully connected now (in theory): but this is still new. My understanding is that societies generally were not so large, communities rather much smaller. In a smaller community, too, it’s easier to communally set standards of behavior, but I don’t really feel like wading into that. What I mean, though, is that maybe smaller communities would be a good thing. Sure, harder to find, but. And sure, there are class- and other exclusionary things about small communities sometimes. But there are also a lot of trolls in the big ones. I obviously don’t have any answers. And I’m not sure I’m going to miss something I never really engaged with much. But it’s interesting, all these anxieties around the slower and quicker deaths our "traditional" social media platforms. I mean, they haven’t been around that long, and is not the promise of technology in part its ephemerality, its ability to theoretically consistently progress, doing ever more with (physically) less? When I was in high school I had to hunt around for someone to invite me to join The Facebook. I want to say it happened during a geometry class.
II.
A friend from grad school who’s since flown to the Big Time Publishing World of New York City came back up to Boston last night, in part, I think, to introduce a new boyfriend, and in part, I think, because another of our cohort’s birthday is coming up, but in any case, Jacqueline is the kind of person who, when they come to town, really gets everyone out of the woodwork. It was nice. We went to Grendel’s; it was too crowded and too loud and we were seated too close but it was lovely just the same. Caught up with an old fiction buddy who I don’t see too much anymore, haven’t seen for a long time (and here: we work just down the block from each other; we made plans to get lunch and I intend to see those plans through). Heard from the poets, talked about plans, who’s still writing and at what. The usual things: jobs, who got married, who’s moved, who has a good recent anecdote.
In a lot of ways the community I’d hoped would persist after doing the MFA program was exploded by our graduating into COVID and by the sort of interpersonal fallings-apart that happen in any group, I suppose. But every now and then we get together and it’s still good, if infrequent. This brings me a lot of pleasure, gives me a lot of hope.