PlusHeart Issue #11: Less continues to be more
"It seems too simple to boil it down to 'the Internet is different now, and a place where I thought I could live my life and be myself doesn’t elicit that feeling anymore.'"
March was a bit busy for me because two classes that I do university lectures for had me booked to speak. I do a lecture for an Esports elective and a Social Media class, but both are pretty much the exact same topic: personal communities like Discord and Twitch Chat, and the psychology behind why these spaces and communities thrive.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve spent enough time both trying to figure myself out and why these communities matter to me that I’m qualified to explain them in a marketing sense. I’ve leaned on this knowledge and empathy while transitioning from journalist to “community guy.”
The night before I was to speak for the first time, I looked at these two-year-old slides and thought “alright, I think I can do better.” I tossed the whole thing out and spent the day-of redoing the slides after putting together an outline. The result was a bit more tilted towards the responsibilities (and failings) of both audience and marketers when it comes to respecting boundaries and being responsible for the environment that’s crafted in fandom.
I could tell that I was speaking a lot of familiar language to these classes (I’ll guess they’re like, 20-22 year olds) and that they grew up in a more modern fandom environment than I did. Part of the slides was saying that the Internet I grew up in was an extension and refining of "Old Internet", where they were influenced by a further refining, shaping and gentrification of that Internet.
Maybe it was a bit too pretentious to decide that was the case, but the main point was to get them thinking about how companies view an authentic, connected thing, and how it might be backwards-engineered and (attempted to be) replicated.
This issue is less about that specifically and more about the associated feeling: after I finished the lectures and since joining in some new spaces (which in general are a lot more well-read than I am) I’ve been a bit more… lost?.. about the realism of that feeling.
It seems too simple to boil it down to “the Internet is different now, and a place where I thought I could live my life and be myself doesn’t elicit that feeling anymore.” I’m not sure if it’s too prudent to say that’s with esports as well, because I can admit that my life is a bit chaotic at the moment, and besides having the DPC on in the background, I’m not doing a terrible amount of watching, either.
I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel that frustration. I’m not sure if it was naive of me to expect different. That latter point is, I think, an evolution of a very emotional response in my brain that is learning to be more compassionate towards validating feelings and needs. Instead of immediately assuming I’m wrong, I’ve upgraded (barely, at the pace this kind of growth usually happens) towards wondering if there’s a possibility there’s a context I could be right.
I mention this personal and not-at-all-boring feeling because this internal conflict is going to become a lot more common, and a lot more explored over the next decade. As we keep dumping the amount of information that’s expected to be kept up with, there’s almost branching paths on where we head:
I’ve noticed that a lot of “inject the Internet into my veins” nerds are now turning to more “traditional living” aesthetics like homesteading or off-the-grid living, as they realize that there’s no longer a place for them on the commercialized Internet. These people aren’t radical or extremists: I think they’re just tired of fighting, and are realizing what they can control.
On a less-extreme scale, more people are discussing accepting the limitations of what they can handle, more from an exhaustion point of view than healthy boundaries.
It feels like a Rubicon has been crossed with the pandemic and how it’s accelerated a new stage of news extremism: I know that Twitter was “always that bad”, but something about the whole Will Smith/Oscars thing really put me off. The amount of intellectual inconsistency between media elites and the surrounding serfdom really just broke my brain a little bit.
On a Discord I’d recently joined, a question popped up around someone who found it difficult to read with the same love or frequency as they had when they were young. Through a discussion, the point came up that this changed when they got their first smartphone. I can empathize with this, because that connection feels real, especially if you went through that “Old Internet, but faster and fancier” generation of community.
For me, while reading was fun and something I loved doing, the computer and Internet were much more exciting, and had much bigger possibilities. I always wanted to that more. I was just limited by how bad my PC was, how slow my Internet went, or things like dial-up affecting availability. Right now, things like reading, TV and movies just feel… too slow? Too basic? Too… solo?
Where I’m going with this is that the resolution to this topic of “getting back on the reading horse” was being purposeful and focused: leaving your phone in the other room, starting a timer, taking breaks, etc. “Treating that reading activity like a muscle” was an apt quote, because it almost feels like the gym: yes, the first couple sessions are going to suck, and it’s not until later where you’re noticing the progress you’ve made.
I want to take this kind of thinking and maybe apply it to social media and “the things I’m paying attention to online” as well. Less accounts followed, less ping-ponging between Twitter to Instagram to Instagram Explore to Reddit, and more importantly, not feeling like I’m a fraud for purposefully introducing distance.
I feel a bit ashamed that I don’t watch more popular esports that I don’t particularly enjoy, because I’m trying to claim a degree of expertise and familiarity with an industry, not just the (admittedly-niche) areas I actually enjoy. Not having watched things like the OWL, CDL or VALORANT (why all the caps?) makes me kind of catch myself and think “okay dude, when someone asked you a question about [brand] during the lecture, your answer was heavily based on preconceptions that may no longer apply.”
I’ve never been hesitant to overthink my self-awareness, and this is part of the trap. The irony is that the empathy required to "figure out today’s consumer" involves reflection off of myself, and how I relate to content and the environment it’s consumed in.
Maybe that’s something to explore further in the future: when I’m used to going off my own intuition to be able to empathize with different spaces and communities, what happens when that changes?
Anyways, going to leave it for this week. Hope you’ve all been well.
Housekeeping
I’ve been playing a lot of Elden Ring lately, and probably am going to write something about it soon. I haven’t done a lot of “writing about stuff I’ve been into lately” mostly because it’s taken a backseat to other life things.
A couple days before my layoff I was actually debating scrapping my Patreon because it seemed like I didn’t know what to do with it, how to grow it, or what kind of content to put on it as an incentive when I was barely putting out stuff without it (my dot-com is woefully sparse these days).
I’m actively trying to navigate what I want to do with this between-job time, mostly because my instinct is always to jump way hard into “things I know”, which is “trying to make content an income source”. The irony is that while I know it, I haven’t been able to apply it.
Anyways, rambling.
I’m playing Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages on my stream on Saturdays. Join my Discord for event notifications.