to be online or not to be online....? that is the question

i'm trying to occupy more meaningful space online. this has been hard due to quite a lot of factors: what makes online content meaningful? can anything online turly be meaningful anymore due to the puppetters controlling every website i click on? how do you consume content ethically in a captitalist society? everyone is talking about analogue right now, completely throwing away everything online, so is there any value in the online? was it there and has it now gone away?

these are things i've been wondering about as i try and complete my task. i've been trying to figure out what social media to get rid of and what to keep because everything is not as black and white as i thought it was. for example, one might think to delete tiktok and to keep substack but the time that i've spent on these apps has led me to come to a different conclusion: substack is an echochamer where it seems like thoguths go to die instead of to flourish -- everyone who posts on there seems to talk about the same thing in the same way. revisiting, recycling, and remaking the same topics of discourse does not have to be a bad thing. it is proof of change, of development, of ambivalence and the tendency to "question everything" (to simplify socrates). it is taking what we have thought about already and thinking about it more, it is never exhausting the ability to learn. however, substack is not this. the discourses never devleop, they merely stay stagnanted with people just reguritiating what others have said already in more interesting and intellectual terms. tiktok, however, though victim of the same fate while also prompting surrealist anti-feminist tiktoks that are so deeply embedded into the app that people don't even notice them anymore (girl dinner, girl math, trad wife tiktok, "healthy" gym tokers... the list goes on), i believe that it is the centre of our cultural zeitgeist right now. everything said on substack and youtube was said on tiktok first. the short form nature of the platform makes it so that people are forced to say complex ideas in the span of a couple of mintues, leabing room for interpretation and expansion from other creators across all platforms. on top of that, the short form content also makes it so that people are forced to be concise and articulate when enganging in discourse. though tiktok breeds insecurities and can only function through the capitalism i just mentioned before, it can and has given us some geniuenly amazing things and ideas. 

so where does that leave me? do i delete tiktok or substack or both or neither? i don't have a real answer to this but here is my tenetative one: using tiktok properly means regulating time spent on there and substack might just have to die, i am tired of trying to find a space for myself in a space of white girls. but, in the end, this doesn't answer any of my questions. evidently, everything is good in moderation. but now that the where of the matter has become abstracted, what about the what and the how at the heart of the hurricane? what type of content is meaningful and how do i make it? 

i always used to think thigns like video essays or short form essays (whether written or videoed) made for meaningful content online. anything thast commented on social issues or art. and also, of course, art itself. to easily complicate this, of coruse, would be to mention that alt-right podcasters are technically making content about "social issues" and how do we even defnie art? some people might call AI art real art, does AI art have a place on the internet? so obviouisly, this question isn't as easy to answer as i thought. but i know i can't control whats get put on the internet and i know i can control what i consume and how and when i choose to consume it. so, to me, "meaningful" content online is anything that explains or encapsulates the human condition to me. wether that be fashion videos, slice of life vlogs, or commentary on my favourite movies.

and lastly, why is it important that we contiune to have an online world? should it be a seperate space from the offline world, should it contiune to be inseperable from each other as it is now? i think that there is value in having our online and offline worlds be interconnected. we shouldn't have to become entirely different people when we open our phones and computers... but at the same time, the interdependence that we're seeing right now with our digitial selves is frightening. people truly are glued to their phones, they are ascribing magical qualities to them in a way that almost surpasses marx's defintion. just a recap for those who don't know, marx wrote about "commodiy fetishisim" in the communist manifesto which is when we ascribe human-like qualities to non-human things, specifically commodities. The way that our generation is attached to our phones is through this relation, we're emotionally attached to what it does to us, we're addicted and we rely on it. in her video, mickey galvin mentions that she never feels alone when she has her phone with her, not because she feels that she can reach out to people but because she actually sees her phone as company. i think a lot of us feel that way... this magical relation that we have to our phone makes it an active part of our resistance and it makes wanting to turn it off feel like wanting to pull the plug.

in order to be online properly, there does need to be a seperation between our online and offline selves. that does not mean creating a whole differet person that is entirely seperate from you who parades around the internet; i mean making sure we don't completely submerge oursleves into the online realm. sometimes, the glaze in someones eyes and their tiiktok mannerisms tell me that they have fallen victim to loosing their selves to their online sleves -- they only exsit online. this is where we see a problem. so regulate screentime and, galvin proposes, to have a purpose everytime that you log onto one of your social media apps. i really think that websites like substack and spacehey, although i have my issues with both the sites, make for interesting social media platforms as its not sharing photos but sharing words. 

now, to conclude, i would just like to try and answer my question from above: what is the value of staying online?

staying online introduces me to a lot of things i otherwise wouldn't find offline. lots of new ideas and connections and reccomendations. being online helps me to curate my taste and to help me form my own offline identity. it exposes me, as i mentioned already, to new ideas and new art that influences the way that i think and the way i see other things. there's a lot of value of ebing online but navigating the New Internet is hard since there's a whole lot of bullshit. but that makes it all the more fun: its a maze that you have to crave your own path through.