A few months ago I was contemplating quitting DeviantArt, and then later on I decided I was going to quit it. Despite what I wrote about twitter, I don't think that social media is all bad and that isn't the reason that I'm quitting DeviantArt, neither was it the reason I quit Twitter or YouTube (I know I said I was not going to quit YouTube, but my opinion have since then changed) for that matter.
Preface
Social media in all fairness is useful in a way, for example you could use Facebook to hang out in certain communities, with LinkedIn you can make networks (very valuable for applying to jobs), Instagram and DeviantArt is quite useful to those artists who want to connect with other artists. I myself met a few of my friends on DeviantArt, so it would be pretty silly of me to say that DeviantArt hasn't helped me gain some friends at all. However it has come to this point that its use has expired and even having it around just feels like a burden.
Digital escapism
When I first joined DeviantArt in Christmas 2013, I couldn't relate to a lot of the people I had at school and had a small, closely-knit group of friends. Most of the people in my year group weren't too interested in the stuff I liked or really liked who I was, I had good intentions but I was often weird and a bit annoying. The internet played quite a large role into filling these voids, I met people who I could relate to.
Since I did not need to interact with them face-to-face, I could bypass a lot of posture and facial expressional checks which made me comfortable with talking to people online, including people of the opposite gender to me (which very few, if any opened up to me in school).
Later on, I told my real-life friends about my online friends and they didn't really seem to like the fact that I was talking to the online friends rather than them. Some called me 'anti-social' for not speaking to them. At the time I thought they were just desperate for attention and I continued spending more time with my online friends. There was also a lot of back-stabbing in my small real-life friendship groups, one of them would annoy the other and they would usually take it out on me. They ridiculed my interest in retro gaming (which I still like but not as ardent over) making up silly jokes about how I was stuck in the past. Unfortunately this kind of bullying, although it declined from there, was still active until the end of high school. I'm not trying to say that these people are horrible, they have, for the most part changed their ways and have matured.
What I am trying to say is that, this is quite important because it may reflect the reason people, especially teenagers and possibly young adults, may have much more pleasant experiences making friends on-line and perhaps how social media can be an escape to some from the horrific realities of their lives.
The spotlight effect
I often talked to the people I knew on-line in a very over-familiar way often saying things which I wouldn't even dare to say IRL. There was no kind of real life response like the intonation of their voices or facial expressions. Especially in 2014, I was incredibly rude and a lot of what I wrote was incredibly cringe-inducing, in fact felt like I had panic attacks when I was deleting that load of toxic waste.
I became much more aware of this when I talked to some of these friends on a voice chat, I was often very shy and awkward and both of us were just waiting for one or another to speak. Even writing messages felt like I was talking to a brick wall, with me writing jokes and funny messages and the other person responding with emoticons. To an extent this can happen in real life, for example in sixth form I would tell a joke to someone in my class and they would giggle a little bit, the difference was that things felt much more like you could understand what the other person was thinking. I have found out the brain does not fully comprehend a "like" or an "emoji" and could signal a social approval which would make my brain associate the like with the fact someone cares about a joke I said rather than an actual social component.
Maybe they did, however due to the VC experience with a few of them I have some doubts, hence explaining the spotlight effect I had, when these people seemed to care much less about me than I had thought. The most embarrassing comments were usually the ones that were long lines of embarrassing jokes and nobody responding to them (in retrospect, I can see why), the worst thing about these is how it would be impossible to know how they would have reacted. In real life, this may happen to a certain degree but it is more obvious since they may have some odd look on their face or be very evasive towards you.
However in real life, what you say doesn't stay up forever unlike its on-line counterpart which would make the conversation in the latter all the more awkward.
Deep values behind real world interactions
Funny thing was that during the time I often used DeviantArt, I frequently thought of meeting my online friends in real life (to be honest I would still like to), I even spoke about it to them a good amount. Now I can really see why I wanted to meet them in person, because real-life interactions are far more valuable than writing/texting to them. I skyped one of my online friends and I really enjoyed it, I made a lot of jokes and we had a good laugh together.
Meeting up with people in real life, although it is a very hard thing to do and I even still struggle to this day with trying to set up a day out with some friends. I am hoping to get better at this, but what I have learned from being in Italy with the sixth formers was that I felt happy hanging out with them, the real-life interactions were very valuable even when I wasn't talking, just over hearing their conversations. Things like Twitter or Instagram do not provide these kinds real life interactions and rather replace them with a like or a re-tweet as social approval indicators.
As I have mentioned before in this post, there are also real-life indicators to if what you say was uncomfortable or odd, therefore there is far more of a way of receiving feedback. I can also see why my friends hated me messaging my online ones. Although they were quite aggressive and idiotic about what they were saying, I now know that they were on to something and my reflections now are a kind of "I told you so" moment.
Conclusion
I'm not trying to say on-line or real-life friends are intuitively bad, better or worse than the other. The real life friends I had have changed and have formed different opinions, in fact a few months ago I even hung out with one of the friends who called me anti-social previously and we had a good time. He also understood why I had these online friends; he seems to have these kinds of friends right now as well.
What I'm trying to say is how the online world can be such a great place to escape to and potentially meet great people to those who may have had bad experiences IRL like I did. The interactions feel like a nice dream, but eventually we will need to wake up to the cold-or-liberating reality that real-life interactions are far more rewarding than its on-line counter part.
And maybe at some point, you could schedule a day out to meet these online friends in real life and have a nice cup of tea or the such like.
With that being said, I will watch the sun descend into the sunset as my DeviantArt account does the same.
That's all from me!
P.S.
I don't know what deleting my DeviantArt will do to the traffic of my blog post, but if it reduces it, I'll try finding another way to gain traffic.
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