Social….stuff

For the past several years, I’ve committed to making a blog post every day of the year. The only way I’ve been able to maintain that is by keeping a running list of content for the days I’m unable to post, and then when I can, catching up and dating the posts to the days I would have posted them if I’d had time.

I think below is roughly my online interaction since my first Internet log-in (via AOL) in 1997:

AOL chatrooms 1997 to around 2002
AOL message boards 2002 to around 2004
Live Journal 2004 to 2011
This Word Press blog 2011 to present

Along the way, of course, there was MySpace, where I had little presence, to Facebook, which I came to abhor. I went from who knows how many friends on FB to I think a current five after the 2016 election. I have never regretted the decision to cut that off, though I do miss my nieces’ and nephews’ and grandnieces’ and -nephews’ FB posts. I can, however, sort of keep up with some of them via Instagram, which is my busiest social media site, even though I am constantly disgruntled that it’s owned by Facebook.

A few months ago I began to visit my Twitter account daily after years of basically ignoring it. I don’t post there–mostly I retweet things and comment on other people’s feeds, but I use it to read what people are talking about. It’s the way I know what memes are making the rounds, but it’s also how I find the topics I want to research for myself–usually relating to social and political issues. Politics and history were part of my upbringing, as they were both always discussed in my home–around the dinner table, for example.

It was when I got to college that I discovered how wired my brain was for sociology, and it became my minor.

Sociology is defined as the “study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction and culture of everyday life. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and change or social evolution.” (Thanks Wikipedia.)

I’ve said on here before that I often feel like I’m an alien sent to study humans on this planet. Humans never cease to interest me. Human behavior can both dazzle and horrify me. Sometimes I weary of it all and step back–but if I’m stepping into music or movies or books for escape, well damn, there they still are, pesky humans who entertain and amuse and challenge and educate me.

Thank goodness for animals and nature–though that can be dicey, too, because of how humans treat animals and our planet. But somehow I maintain.

The fiction I worked on this year drove me to research things that have led me down interesting paths. I’ve explored a lot of things about which I have some longstanding and strong opinions. I have found many of those opinions challenged both by my studies and my observations.

There is nothing so alluring as complacency. It’s comfortable to use our own experience or the experiences of those close to us as the yardstick by which we measure the world. But the world is big, and we are small. A yardstick is not enough.

I said on someone’s Twitter feed that my mantra going into 2020 is “learn more, do better.”

There is a lot to learn, and doing better not only means opening myself up to tough teachers, but not succumbing to the comfortable.