Are we tired of text? Or are we just tired?

Once in a while there is a bout of introspection on Bluesky that the network will never take off roughly because text based social networks are somehow passé. See this from this morning for example. The same critique is levelled at Mastodon – that the struggles of that network to take off are somehow because it is text based.

But I think the core issue is another one.

When, over the past couple of years, those of us news junkies who began to move away from Twitter/X after the Musk takeover, we were already tired. We were already worn out from the information overload from a decade on Twitter.

The turning point for me personally, looking back, was the Brexit referendum. There were days during that campaign where it was impossible to tell truth from fake, and people from bots. There were days where UKIP MEPs would allege I was paid for doing things I was doing simply because I believed them – there was nothing untoward. That was the point where I switched from giving people the benefit of the doubt on social media to blocking them. Maintaining my sanity was more important than trying to persuade those people of anything.

And the Jon Worth on Bluesky and Mastodon is then not the 2009 Jon Worth from Twitter. He’s the 2022 Jon Worth from Twitter, more jaundiced, more cynical, more irritable. And definitely more tired. My blocking behaviour has simply been carried over from Twitter in 2022.

As if that were not enough, community memory is also weaker. There was a peculiar situation last week on Bluesky where I was writing about Schengen and border controls – a topic I have been writing about on and off on social media for more than a decade – where some dude alleged (I paraphrase) “who do you think you are? Someone who actually has a reputation about this?” Well, yes, actually – I do, or did, but most of it went up in smoke when Twitter went up in smoke. And now I have neither the proven track record, nor the community that knows I have that track record, to prove it to this person.

This isn’t then the death of text. For those of us in the wider political arena the written word is still going to matter. It is still more efficient to type than to film a video or record audio, especially when it comes to editing it or checking it. If I need to find what a politician said, or a project they committed to carrying out, it’s more efficient I search through their words than try to listen to a video of a speech. And in terms of commentary on political topics, our first reactions are still going to be with written text. Podcasts, videos, TV shows etc. will follow.

I don’t know what to really do about this. I am trying to be tolerant, and to give people the benefit of the doubt. When I can find the energy I can painstakingly try to explain why what I am saying is because yes, I have worked on this, and yes, I do know what I am on about. And I try to stick to my rule of commenting only on topics where I can bring some genuine insight, and not stray into things that concern me but where I bring no more knowledge than anyone else.

But overall I think I am not tired of text, or text based social networks. Instead I am simply tired and jaundiced.