My current guilty pleasure/obsession is ‘The Gilded Age’. I want to be Bertha Russell, faults and foibles and failings and all. While I sadly won’t be squeezing into a corset or bustle anytime soon (never say never) it’s interesting to see how people behaved and communicated over a century ago. The means and mechanisms may have changed, but the same social cues and codes to indicate one’s location in society remain intact. And humans have a need to know where we are in relation to one another, even if that’s a fault that can only lead to unhappiness.
Today we make judgments and appraisals based on follows and unfollows, friending and unfriending, inviting or blocking: subtle social media motions that carry either a forbidding chill or a warming embrace. The game is the same, even if the apparatus is different.
I don’t place much stock in it, as labeling and putting people into categories has never been my jam. I trust my good friends know that too – and understand that a ‘like’ I’ve clicked on something they’ve posted should carry no more meaning than the lack of one elsewhere. My social media mode of operating is too whimsical and changeable to be bound to the rules of modern online etiquette. Still, it’s fun to watch and study the actions of those who do place importance on these subtle and insignificant maneuverings. Keeping a sense of amusement is the best way to navigate the social media world.
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