Social networking - is it all just navel-gazing and blogging about blogging? Or are we actually building connections that will matter?So one of my resolutions, post-Confusion, was to be better about social networking and spreading word of my projects. Towards that end I’ve been posting scraps of the WIP on a daily basis (and plan to do so until it’s done or someone buys it), doing more writing for the SFWA blog (just finished up a review, and I’ve got interviews scheduled with authors Myke Cole and Jason Heller) as well as a series I proposed on Thomas Burnett Swann for the Tor.com blog, and — in keeping with my belief that one of the best ways to promote yourself is to promote other people — trying to mention interesting stuff on various social networks.
So – it’s weird, but they all have such a different vibe for me that I find myself posting different stuff depending on what the network is, and this, I think, leads to a certain amount of inefficiency and wasted time, which since in theory I am a fiction writer more than I am a blogger is something I should curb.
I’ve pretty much abandoned Livejournal, and I don’t know whether that’s a good or bad thing. I should probably set up a widget to collect G+ posts or Twitter tweets on there. Google+ is great (and my favorite, truth be told), but not everyone is on there. I use it a LOT for class stuff.
Facebook is where almost all of my family members are (and where I get most of my baby pictures, between certain people named Corwin, Dresden, Leeloo, and Mason) and it’s also where I seem to talk about politics the most. Twitter and I have an on-again, off-again relationship, and I always feel like I’m missing parts of the conversation on it in the BLAST of stuff from the firehose of tweets constantly crawling up my page. And then there’s this blog as well.
One of the things hampering me in setting up a good system is a feeling that too much social interaction can be a bad thing — that people will unsubscribe if there’s too much, and it seems as though that varies from one network to another. I like Jay Lake’s Link Salad — and maybe one thing to do is collect the links and stuff posted on other networks to present here in a weekly entry. Is that something people who read this blog regularly — or sporadically — would find useful?
And should I be posting the same stuff on all the networks? I took a look at what I’d posted over the course of one day on FB, Twitter, and G+ and while some stuff got crossposted, there wasn’t a lot of overlap.
Part of the reason I’ve never cottoned to Twitter is that it feels like you’re shouting all the time. I like being able to like or + a comment to show I read and appreciated it without feeling like I have to say something. And conducting a conversation on the latter two feels like…a conversation, while Twitter feels like shouting across a room of people who aren’t particularly interested (or else are overly so) interested in the conversation.
What do you think – how much social networking is too much? Do you stick to a particular network or employ the same scattershot approach?
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I’ve been thinking of this as well. We’re in a content rich era. The content itself isn’t that rich, but there’s plenty of it. Having someone I trust point out the sparklies would be nice. In a way, that used to be the job of editors. They were the gatekeepers of cool. That class is diminishing. Additionally, I think publishing will turn into a true collective. If you’re a newbie, you’ll need some recognized stamp of approval. Cross promotion, without it seeming forced or false, is what will allow the ecology of our genre to survive. Similar authors will collect like turtles on their little islands and bark out, if you like so-and-so, then you’ll like my friend so-and-so who writes something similar. I totally plan to start promoting my friends and their work though, it seems a good use for my blog.
This is one of the hardest parts of writing for me. I love Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc, but it’s really hard to keep up with the cyber world and hard to gauge where your own presence has the most effect. I want a robot who will take all my thoughts and selectively clever them up for tweets, FB/G+ posts and blogs, then report back to me everything people said on every platform.
One of the odd crossovers lately has been the amount of comments I get when I link to my blog on Facebook. The blog itself doesn’t garner many comments in the comments section, but many people leave their thoughts on Facebook. This is nice but it sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog open to the whole Internet–the comments by anyone should encourage strangers to comment and make it look “hot,” so to speak. C’est la writing in the digital age, I spose.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past year, and I don’t have any good answers. I’ve given up on LiveJournal, and in some ways that makes me really sad, because I miss the community I had built there, but in other ways, it’s let me be more productive, because I don’t feel like I have to keep up.
I’d gotten into a weird spiral where I felt bad about not posting enough, and also about not staying caught up, and all that feeling bad made me less productive over all, because instead of reading some of my friends’ entries, or writing more of my own, I’d think about how some friends might feel sad if I didn’t get to their posts, and also how it might not be fair to post my own entries without having time to read and respond to others, and then I just wouldn’t do anything, but I’d worry about it, which took energy.
Now I float between G+, Facebook, and Twitter. I think I use Twitter the least, but it’s also the one I will be more likely to use if I am out and only have my phone available. Facebook has all my family and a lot of my close friends, so I tend to check in there regularly and skim my stream, but I post usually for friends and family and not as much for writing stuff. G+ I love for keeping track of stuff like your class, or planning outings with some of my local friends who use it, and I sometimes use it to share interesting links or talk about work (but not as much as maybe I should?).
The best thing to me about my current approach is that I don’t feel guilty about not seeing things. I interact when I see something that sparks me to converse, but I don’t ever feel like I need to have seen everything (let alone comment on everything). I don’t mind what other people post, but I’m more likely to interact with people who are posting about stuff they genuinely find interesting (whether it’s the brownies they just ate, or an article about a new kind of lizard, or even work-related stuff they’re excited or bummed about), and not just posting impersonal streams of stuff that boils down to ads for their work.
I’m coming around to thinking “enough” is a level of interaction that makes me feel like I’m still connected to people I find interesting, and “too much” is a level of interaction that leaves me feeling guilty and/or unproductive.
They are all tools and I use them for different things, much like you don’t use a hammer (Twitter), when you need a rake (blog), or use a saw (Google plus), when you need a screwdriver (Livejournal). For me, Twitter is my way to broadcast to different hashtags that I think will find the information I have to share interesting.
Facebook is more friendly. Like you, my family and real-life friends are there. I was being more political there, but have found that it backfires mostly because many people don’t understand the unspoken rules of social networking that if you don’t agree with the post, unless the poster specifically asks for discussion, they likely don’t want it. They want to share with like minds. So, I’ve backed off the political stuff — unless say it affects my creativity, like the SOPA/PIPA stuff. So Facebook is to engage my nearest audience. Twitter more far away. I use both to direct traffic to my blog or project site (e.g., http://www.martiuscatalyst.com). Both tools are useless unless they drive people back to my blog (one of my new year’s resolutions is to get the traffic on my blog up.) Google plus is my land of rebels and highly technical folks. I seem to cross post most to G+, as it is still fledgling, but I can see its usefulness down the road as a clearing house and where I can target messages to specific circles (and perhaps dispense with twitter and facebook all together). I also use LJ to connect to other authors, writers, artists. My LJ that contains my most personal thoughts, but I keep that friends only — even given that some of them I’ve never personally met. Rarely is my messaging crossing over, since each has a different audience. And that, I suppose, is the point of all of it. What’s too much and what’s not enough? Unless I can direct something back specifically to me the author or my work — given that includes the things that inspire and motivate me — I don’t repost/retweet. That seems to give it a balance. At least, that is, for me.
Currently I use the different platforms for different kinds of communication, and it works pretty well for me. When/If I reach the point where it makes sense to have an author page, then I’ll have to find some new equilibrium; I’m not sure what would go there as opposed to something else. Intuitively it seems that little to conversation happens on fan pages–only promotional stuff, like release dates, signings, and contests.
The only thing I cross post is links to my own blog, and I feel badly about it, but not badly enough not do do it. 😉 I used to have a circle exclusively for people who were not already getting those tweets on facebook and twitter, but Google+ is now such a big part of Google’s other search results–but only if you post publicly that I feel like I need to post those links publicly for SEO purposes. (I know . . . I feel slimy just using that acronym, but what can you do?)
I enjoy Twitter and find it the least time-consuming. Do you use something like Tweetdeck? I find that Tweetdeck allows me to casually follow the stream without having to actively focus on it. I just reply to whatever moves me to reply. Also, it is possible to do the equivalent of +1-ing a post–you can “favorite” it. Nobody really knows except the poster, but I’m pleased whenever one of my tweets gets a favorite.
You’re right about the lack of privacy/intimacy in your conversations, but if you wanted privacy or intimacy, would you be *networking*?
I quite LJ several years ago – it was just too depressing. Twitter is a write-only channel for me. I never, ever read it. FB is also becoming very much a write-only site. There are a handful of groups and people I keep up with every couple of days, but I have cut down the time I read FB to minutes a day. It’s also useful for helping organize events sometimes, but I really do find a big generational bell curve on FB.
I tend to think that I live a very uninteresting life (well, not to me but mostly to other people), yet when I see a post from my niece that she’s up at 3am with a tummy-ache, I’m not so sure my self-view is valid. I think I’m more focused on living life rather than talking about it, I guess.
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Patreon Post: Seven Clockwork Angels
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy “Clockwork Fairies.”This is a children’s steampunk retelling of Sleeping Beauty; I originally wrote it for the Fairypunk project, but I wanted to get it out here and figured there’s plenty of other fairy tales I can tackle when it’s time.
Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing on a Pin
If a clock has ticked, it must tock, and thus time moves along. And in every tick and tock, there’s a story, and sometimes more than one.
Once upon a tick and tock, there was a great Lord and a greater Lady, who were Patrons of the Arts and Sciences. They endowed libraries and laboratories, and commissioned portraits and poems and marvelous machines that could play chess or spin a silk thread so fine you could barely see it or that could even build their own, tinier machines to make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on, until they produced the head of a pin inhabited by seven clockwork angels, all dancing.
The Lord and Lady loved the works they commissioned, but they yearned to produce something of their own. And one day it came to pass that the Lady announced to her Lord that they had collaborated very well indeed, and that she would soon produce an heir.
Their daughter was fine and fair. They named her Aurora, after the Aurora Borealis, and to celebrate her christening, they invited all the scientists and artists and musicians and philosophers and inventors they had helped.
The day of the christening, Aurora was given amazing gifts: a pair of spectacles that could see everything from the smallest cell to the farthest star; a flowering garden whose trees produced avocado pears and pineapples, cherries and peaches, all from the same branch; a clock that could tell her the time on the moon and predict the next three days’ weather with reasonable accuracy; a talking parasol that recited cheerful limericks in the morning to amuse her and long, languorous epics in the evening to lull her to sleep; and sundry other delightful devices and contraptions, each more cunning than the last.
But the Lord and Lady had neglected to invite one guest, a scientist named Artemus Scuttlepinch (who might have been omitted on purpose, for he was very bad at dinner conversation) and he stepped forward at the end.
“I have a gift as well!” he announced. “Behold the Cabinet of Dreadful Fates!” He whisked his dinner cape aside with a flourish, revealing a squat box painted a malignant black. Brass dials and switches covered its face.
Scuttlepinch steepled his fingers as though preparing a classroom lecture. “I have harnessed various eldritch and magnetic energies,” he said. “Whatever fate the machine pronounces for an individual, will come true, with 98% accuracy. And”¦” He sneered here, and would have twirled his moustache if it had been long enough. “The fates are never pleasant ones.”
Before anyone could stop him, he said, “This is for Aurora!” He pressed a switch.
The machine clicked and clattered ominously, and then clicked some more, finally producing a slip of paper. Scuttlepinch snatched it up and read it aloud. “On her eighteenth birthday, Aurora will prick her finger on a spindle and die!”
“Poppycock!” shouted the Lady. “No one ever died of a pin prick!”
“Preposterous!” shouted the Lord. “The spindle is an obsolete technology!”
He signaled for the guards, who took the cackling Scuttlepinch by the arms. Another seized the machine and raising it overhead, dashed it on the ground, where it shattered, revealing a series of gleaming tubes and poisonous green lubricant, which roiled like drops of mercury on the floor. Scuttlepinch only laughed the harder; the sound sent shivers down the spines of the witnesses.
But another scientist, Miss Mariah Fleetthought, spotting Scuttlepinch, had lingered in the back of the crowd, fearing just such an occurrence. She now stepped forward, clearing her throat with a diffident manner.
“Here,” she said, “perhaps this will help. My own research has led in a similar direction. This is the Good Luck Gizmo, instilled with the computational power of a Babbage engine and possessing its own chemistry of droplets distilled from wishing wells, the sap of seven leaf clovers, and another liquid whose origin I cannot disclose. It cannot avert dreadful fates, but it may alleviate them.”
She set the box she held on the floor, and it unfolded into a clockwork kitten, which picked its way through the shards and droplets to leap nimbly into Aurora’s crib and curl there, its green eyes glittering watchfully despite its position of repose.
After that, the Lord and Lady took comfort in the raising of their daughter and avoided thinking of her possible fate, although they were instrumental in passing a bill that banned spindles outright. She was a bright and sunny child, and their delight in her outweighed all other considerations, until the marvelous machines produced under their patronage were bundled into a cellar to sit unused and dusty.
Aurora was talented and well-tutored, and had all the social graces as well. Her only flaw, which no scientist counted an actual weakness, was a driving curiosity and a craving to know how things worked, which led to her taking many things apart before she learned how to put them back together.
In all of this, she was companioned by the clockwork cat, which haunted her footsteps and watched with wise green eyes as she dismantled things. They came to call it Gizmo, and sometimes forgot that it was not a living creature, for it seemed as cat-like as any cat, despite its devotion to the child.
On her eighteenth birthday, they held a party for Aurora, and invited many young people of her age. But she found them boring, preferring to talk to the scientists about her own discoveries and eventually, bored, she slipped away, trailed by Gizmo.
She made her way down to the cellar, where she was in the process of taking apart a particularly marvelous lace-making machine, because she was curious about the patterns it produced. Gizmo did not approve of this particular machine, which was curious, and today, as she continued to explore its inner workings, the cat grew increasingly agitated, swatting at her with a paw and meowing in its tinny voice, till she pushed it aside more roughly than she meant to.
As she did so, her balance slipped a little and her hand pushed farther into the machine, where it met a certain inner part that spun thread, something that any seamstress might have called a spindle.
She withdrew her hand with a cry of pain, looking at the drop of blood on it. Dizziness overcame her and she sat back on her heels. Darkness pressed in on her vision, but she could hear Gizmo nearby, its head pushing hard against her, purring. Her heart faltered, but the rhythm of the purrs soothed it, made it slip into a slower but still existing rhythm as she fell asleep.
Crouched beside her, the cat opened its jaws and glittering motes flew out. Anyone wearing Aurora’s spectacles might have seen them: tiny clockwork angels with shining spindles, setting to work.
Bit by bit the angels spun, and the air became glass. First filling the room, suspending the sleeping Aurora, then spreading outward from the cellar, catching the mansion’s inhabitants till they were suspended as well, unmoving, but still in the attitudes of life in which they had been captured: the Lord and Lady holding hands as they walked in the garden among the partygoers, looking for their daughter; the cook putting the final layer of icing on the seven-layer cake intended to cap the evening; the butler tending the enormous furnace that heated the hot-water, even the flames, all caught in glass.
Scientists came from all over to study the enormous lump of glass in the middle of the city. They tried drills of diamond and moon metal, and acids that would burn through almost anything, and certain frequencies of sound, but the glass stayed, obdurate and unyielding. Some set up camp in order to study the phenomenon; after a few decades an open-air university sprang up there, devoted to unlocking the science behind the glass’s appearance. In time, everyone forgot what lay inside the glass as its surface dulled and clouded with years.
Till one day, a new scholar appeared at the University, which by now had been built so far that it completely encased the block of glass. He was a young man of modest garb and humble demeanor, but he brought with him a black leather satchel of the kind doctors often carry.
When questioned, he indicated that he wished to study the glass at the University’s heart. The other students derided him. By now they had forgotten about the glass, since no study of it had ever yielded the slightest result, and it was regarded a fruitless and outmoded subject. But he persisted, and eventually they took him to the corridor that led to the glass enclosing the mansion’s front door.
All he did there was open his satchel. Nothing came from it at all, but after it had been opened for a moment, he smiled and closed it again, before inviting them to go drinking with him.
He and his fellows drank all through the night. And while they did, the tiny clockwork butterflies, too small for the eye to see, that had risen from his suitcase, clung to the glass and slowly ate away at it.
In the morning, the students that had been drinking heard a great crash. The center of the University, an immense airy structure used to study the movements of the stars, had fallen in, lacking the glass upon which its slender struts had once rested.
They rushed to the corridor and found the glass gone. Pressing inside, they found the building, the confused partygoers wandering about among the wreckage covering the garden, the Lord and Lady among them, dressed in antiquated clothes and speaking in accents that had not been heard in a century.
Some pushed on, into the still intact mansion, and wandered its hallways in turn, until they came to a cellar door guarded by a clockwork cat. Inside, the new student sat watching the sleeping Aurora, patiently waiting for her to stir.
Which of course she did. But that story must wait for another tick of the clock, when the angels dance again.
-The End-
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The Jelly Bean Tanker Explosion, drawn using Sketchpad Pro on the iPad, included here because a blog entry is so much more interesting looking when there's a visual element. Plus, I like this picture.Should it be “on” or “upon” the wind? I’m torn. Either way, here’s a scrap to tantalize you a little.
He tried the drugs of Waterdeep.
He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.
He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.
He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.
He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.
He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.
He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.
He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.
He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.
He drifted from high to high, abandoning himself and becoming a new thing.
8 Responses
I’ve been thinking of this as well. We’re in a content rich era. The content itself isn’t that rich, but there’s plenty of it. Having someone I trust point out the sparklies would be nice. In a way, that used to be the job of editors. They were the gatekeepers of cool. That class is diminishing. Additionally, I think publishing will turn into a true collective. If you’re a newbie, you’ll need some recognized stamp of approval. Cross promotion, without it seeming forced or false, is what will allow the ecology of our genre to survive. Similar authors will collect like turtles on their little islands and bark out, if you like so-and-so, then you’ll like my friend so-and-so who writes something similar. I totally plan to start promoting my friends and their work though, it seems a good use for my blog.
Oh, glad you’re going to be writing about Swann. I remember talking about him with you at Orycon. If there’s an author ripe for rediscovery, he’s it.
As for social networking, I’m unable to leave it alone and unable to find a way to do it effectively and efficiently. Basically, argh.
I just adore Swann’s stuff. I realized that it was a huge huge influence on the world I use in the Tabat stories.
This is one of the hardest parts of writing for me. I love Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc, but it’s really hard to keep up with the cyber world and hard to gauge where your own presence has the most effect. I want a robot who will take all my thoughts and selectively clever them up for tweets, FB/G+ posts and blogs, then report back to me everything people said on every platform.
One of the odd crossovers lately has been the amount of comments I get when I link to my blog on Facebook. The blog itself doesn’t garner many comments in the comments section, but many people leave their thoughts on Facebook. This is nice but it sort of defeats the purpose of having a blog open to the whole Internet–the comments by anyone should encourage strangers to comment and make it look “hot,” so to speak. C’est la writing in the digital age, I spose.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past year, and I don’t have any good answers. I’ve given up on LiveJournal, and in some ways that makes me really sad, because I miss the community I had built there, but in other ways, it’s let me be more productive, because I don’t feel like I have to keep up.
I’d gotten into a weird spiral where I felt bad about not posting enough, and also about not staying caught up, and all that feeling bad made me less productive over all, because instead of reading some of my friends’ entries, or writing more of my own, I’d think about how some friends might feel sad if I didn’t get to their posts, and also how it might not be fair to post my own entries without having time to read and respond to others, and then I just wouldn’t do anything, but I’d worry about it, which took energy.
Now I float between G+, Facebook, and Twitter. I think I use Twitter the least, but it’s also the one I will be more likely to use if I am out and only have my phone available. Facebook has all my family and a lot of my close friends, so I tend to check in there regularly and skim my stream, but I post usually for friends and family and not as much for writing stuff. G+ I love for keeping track of stuff like your class, or planning outings with some of my local friends who use it, and I sometimes use it to share interesting links or talk about work (but not as much as maybe I should?).
The best thing to me about my current approach is that I don’t feel guilty about not seeing things. I interact when I see something that sparks me to converse, but I don’t ever feel like I need to have seen everything (let alone comment on everything). I don’t mind what other people post, but I’m more likely to interact with people who are posting about stuff they genuinely find interesting (whether it’s the brownies they just ate, or an article about a new kind of lizard, or even work-related stuff they’re excited or bummed about), and not just posting impersonal streams of stuff that boils down to ads for their work.
I’m coming around to thinking “enough” is a level of interaction that makes me feel like I’m still connected to people I find interesting, and “too much” is a level of interaction that leaves me feeling guilty and/or unproductive.
They are all tools and I use them for different things, much like you don’t use a hammer (Twitter), when you need a rake (blog), or use a saw (Google plus), when you need a screwdriver (Livejournal). For me, Twitter is my way to broadcast to different hashtags that I think will find the information I have to share interesting.
Facebook is more friendly. Like you, my family and real-life friends are there. I was being more political there, but have found that it backfires mostly because many people don’t understand the unspoken rules of social networking that if you don’t agree with the post, unless the poster specifically asks for discussion, they likely don’t want it. They want to share with like minds. So, I’ve backed off the political stuff — unless say it affects my creativity, like the SOPA/PIPA stuff. So Facebook is to engage my nearest audience. Twitter more far away. I use both to direct traffic to my blog or project site (e.g., http://www.martiuscatalyst.com). Both tools are useless unless they drive people back to my blog (one of my new year’s resolutions is to get the traffic on my blog up.) Google plus is my land of rebels and highly technical folks. I seem to cross post most to G+, as it is still fledgling, but I can see its usefulness down the road as a clearing house and where I can target messages to specific circles (and perhaps dispense with twitter and facebook all together). I also use LJ to connect to other authors, writers, artists. My LJ that contains my most personal thoughts, but I keep that friends only — even given that some of them I’ve never personally met. Rarely is my messaging crossing over, since each has a different audience. And that, I suppose, is the point of all of it. What’s too much and what’s not enough? Unless I can direct something back specifically to me the author or my work — given that includes the things that inspire and motivate me — I don’t repost/retweet. That seems to give it a balance. At least, that is, for me.
Currently I use the different platforms for different kinds of communication, and it works pretty well for me. When/If I reach the point where it makes sense to have an author page, then I’ll have to find some new equilibrium; I’m not sure what would go there as opposed to something else. Intuitively it seems that little to conversation happens on fan pages–only promotional stuff, like release dates, signings, and contests.
The only thing I cross post is links to my own blog, and I feel badly about it, but not badly enough not do do it. 😉 I used to have a circle exclusively for people who were not already getting those tweets on facebook and twitter, but Google+ is now such a big part of Google’s other search results–but only if you post publicly that I feel like I need to post those links publicly for SEO purposes. (I know . . . I feel slimy just using that acronym, but what can you do?)
I enjoy Twitter and find it the least time-consuming. Do you use something like Tweetdeck? I find that Tweetdeck allows me to casually follow the stream without having to actively focus on it. I just reply to whatever moves me to reply. Also, it is possible to do the equivalent of +1-ing a post–you can “favorite” it. Nobody really knows except the poster, but I’m pleased whenever one of my tweets gets a favorite.
You’re right about the lack of privacy/intimacy in your conversations, but if you wanted privacy or intimacy, would you be *networking*?
I quite LJ several years ago – it was just too depressing. Twitter is a write-only channel for me. I never, ever read it. FB is also becoming very much a write-only site. There are a handful of groups and people I keep up with every couple of days, but I have cut down the time I read FB to minutes a day. It’s also useful for helping organize events sometimes, but I really do find a big generational bell curve on FB.
I tend to think that I live a very uninteresting life (well, not to me but mostly to other people), yet when I see a post from my niece that she’s up at 3am with a tummy-ache, I’m not so sure my self-view is valid. I think I’m more focused on living life rather than talking about it, I guess.