By Sarah Pulliam Bailey (at WaPo), which says some things I'm going to talk about in the next post but also has this:
[T]he biggest stars of the mommy Internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They’re curators of life.... And with all the photos of minimalist kitchens... we’ve lost... a place to share vulnerability.... Instagram is built for beauty (its filters make your life look better), not for rawness.... The shift to shorter posts and an emphasis on likes and hearts has changed the tone and content of what moms find online: more pictures, fewer words, less grit....
I just want to connect that to this, the first thing that hit me when I looked at Twitter this morning. You have to watch through to the end:
Posts
27 comments:
Ann-
Step away from Twitter now. No more Instagram. This stuff is built-in emotional blackmail.
They are trying to make us all feel inadequate. Each one of us. All the time. Every day.
Is it any surprise that women who spend an inordinate amount of time picking out clothes, doing their hair, putting on makeup, and going out for drinks with friends, would add "find the best filters for their photos"?
Instagram was destined to become the extension of the culture where the right girl in the right place with the right drink and the right friends meets the perfect guy who makes her life complete.
Those who don't feel they've found that situation can easily believe all their efforts didn't lead to fun nights, but a sense they'd failed in their ultimate missions. That if they'd just been a little bit better, they'd have those lives too.
That's all it is. We can either reject the fantasy or become slaves to it.
Every Picture Tells A Story ... Rod Stewart
How long until Chuck turns this into a thread about Trump?
I'd say the path is something like: average moms, Instagram filters, models, Melania, Trump lies every time he opens his mouth!!!
Logic’s number, yes?
We’re complaining about gentrification, like lamenting how safe Brooklyn has become?
Interesting PSA video, especially in view of the linked post. I've been on the internet since its start and have watched this evolution from the raw honesty of most earlier blogs to the "look at me and my awesome life" content that now populates so much social media. If I were a younger woman, I don't know that I'd be able to resist the impulse to compare and find my own life coming up short. There are, of course, some great blogs remaining, but the number has diminished so much the last decade.
It took but a moment to learn that 68% of Instagram users are women. I am not sure what the stats are on how many selfies women take compared to men, but it must be at least 4 or 5 to one. So what we have is Instagram as an extension of female competition with other females. And, certainly to my amusement, sound evidence that a good half-century of moralizing, fun-killing, sexless feminism has done little to change this defining feature of women. Rock on girls!
Last night we did a stay-at-home double feature about show-business lives redeemed: "Crazy Heart" and "Tender Mercies". Each had a great male lead (Jeff Bridges and Robert Duvall, respectively) who spends the film putting his house in order (as Jordan Peterson would say) after reaching rock bottom. . Each featured an impossibly cute and good step-son figure and a beautiful single mom (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Tess Harper) who would like to have a good man in her life. Tender Mercies is a little grittier, but both tell an archetypical story of self-redemption, and both are full of the bleak beauty of the American southwest. Two great directors--Brian Beresford and Scott Cooper.
Time well spent.
Among ordinary things, I'd like to know where the tire pressure gauge that's always in the glove box is. It has no other home.
If writing is self exposure, the readers today have moved along to exposure by doing selfies. That's ok, but it loses the power of the language. Emogis and hieroglyphs are lazy steps backwards in evolution of humans connecting to other humans skills.
Give me that old time Blogging any day.
We rented Touch of Evil last night, and were not that impressed. But it had the great ones in it at their prime: Orson Wells, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, and Vivien Leigh.
I just checked. Thera are over 1,000,000 posts about meatballs. Allentown DA's office currently investigating all posters.
"Step away from Twitter now. No more Instagram. This stuff is built-in emotional blackmail."
1. I never use Instagram.
2. I sometimes tweet, but I prefer blogging.
3. You didn't mention Facebook. I do keep up with some old friends and acquaintances there, but I have to self-censor constantly to have any place there, so I keep in minimal. People do not want any grit at all on Facebook.
traditionalguy--You might want to check that cast list for Touch of Evil.
Twitter is like being on a bus ride with the stupidest, meanest people in the world.
Amadeus is already awake this AM. A Touch of Evil had Charlton Heston and not Burt Lancaster. They look alike to me in Black and White. And it also had young Za Za Gabor and Dennis Weaver in minor roles.
Grit is something stuck to sandpaper or found in your gutters after it's been washed down off the shingles by the rain. Gritty is a word to describe the lower half of my dog after he's been out for a walk along the river's edge when the snow and ice has been melting.
I've made a few failed attempts to watch Godless on Netflix because it's gotten good hype. The press release must tell reviewers to be sure to work in the word "gritty."
Gritty? Lady Mary wears a face full of makeup and has her eyebrows threaded. The woman has no pores.
Maybe she uses grit and a rag as part of her daily beauty regimen.
After all, the TV show is set before the invention of the battery-powered rotary facial brush. And after all, the competition is fierce and there are products to be sold.
There's not much money to be made in selling contentment, or so I've been lead to believe.
Here's some grit. The demographic with a skyrocketing suicide rate is older white women. Not one in that video.
Eric the Fruit Bat. I know just what you mean about "Godless" but I hope you'll keep watching through to the end.
Female competition.
People do not want any grit at all on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't want any grit unless Facebook-approved grit.
I saw a twitter bio from a woman who describes herself as a "fashion and beauty influencer."
And not much else.
1,400 followers. And 1,400 or so subscribers to her YouTube channel. So unless she's running an industry inside baseball video news and industry channel with all insider subscribers, she's not influencing much.
The suicide prevention "PSA" is tonally jarring, because it has exactly the same heartwarming style as every other tech ad -- a carefully curated multiethnic crowd with slightly offbeat but unthreatening hobbies. And, as it carefully notes, it was shot on a Google Pixel 2 (TM). And then they reveal that these people are all suicidal -- not with a picture of their carefully curated multiethnic with slightly offbeat but unthreatening hobbies-having faces, but with a screeenshot of a suicide prevention app they undoubtedly accessed with their new Google Pixel 2 (TM) phone (now available in stores!).
People have always joked about the perfect people in commercials being secretly desperate and suicidal -- here it's the point of the ad. But there's no setup of the people not being perfect! We just jump from perfection to suicide. It's like an ad for a suicide prevention app that will get you right back to being perfect again.
I've made a few failed attempts to watch Godless on Netflix because it's gotten good hype. The press release must tell reviewers to be sure to work in the word "gritty."
Gritty? Lady Mary wears a face full of makeup and has her eyebrows threaded. The woman has no pores.
I saw the first episode. I liked it, but the male lead is physically wrong for a Western. Slender without being wiry. You could never buy him doing manual labor on a farm.
A true Western hero should either be strong enough to handle a vigorous life of shooting and riding and roping (John Wayne), or be the unkillable scrawny type (Clint Eastwood). David Harbour, who plays the sheriff in Stranger Things, would be excellent in a Western.
Clint Eastwood is actually listed at 6'3" and 216 pounds, so I shouldn't call him scrawny. But he definitely plays the unkillable scrawny type.
John Wayne is listed at 6'4" and 170 pounds, which should be a reminder not to take these listings seriously.
Given the research and commentary that social media probably increases feelings of loneliness an inadequacy, seems like a good place to advertise a hotline.
For those who hadn't already killed themselves around 0:45, that is.
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