Musings #2: We Fear What We Do Not Know-Part 2

Even if we do know about it

This post falls under the Cultural Anthropology field.

This is a three part article-essay about understanding why we fear what we fear. I would encourage you to read Part 1 first before reading this article-essay.

Side Note: This post is longer due to me having some lots of thoughts about social media+answers to questions I asked in Shout Out #15. The final article for what has unintentionally become a mini-series will be much shorter. I appreciate everyone who sent in their answers, and I appreciate everyone who stops by to read this post as well as my previous posts!

Speaking of…

In my previous post, I talked about how we have a fear of AI. I want to make an additional comment, one that I did put in the comments to a reader’s response: Another positive aspect of AI would be to help people with who have social anxiety. We all probably know someone who is usually the quiet one in the group, or is in the corner at a party or an event, wanting to socialize but feeling that they are out of place. I’m not saying that they should use AI to avoid social interaction with another human being, just that perhaps talking to a Chat bot might help them be able to interact with other people. I recently watched an episode of the show, Futurama¹, that explored this idea. The ending was a little extreme for my taste, but there was a good intention made on the effort of a Chat Bot named Chelsea who was trying to help Leela make friends. I won’t spoil it for you should you decide to watch the episode. The reader was the fantabulous

Nishant Jain

. Please go be a Sneaky Reader and check out his page

The SneakyArt Post

!

Now it’s time to temporarily move on from our A.I. fear discussion, and talk about a different topic that has also been a hot potato and inciter of fear over several decades.

For this article, we are going to explore the effects of social media culture. At the end of the article, I will be putting comments from readers who answered my questions in my last Shout Out post about their experiences with social media, forums, and chat systems. Thank you so much to my mom, my partner Dylan, and my friends

Jeanine Kitchel

, Jeff, and

Nadia Gerassimenko

for answering the questions! I include the questions I asked and if you, Fellow Musers, Notes Followers, and readers passing through, would like to answer those questions, I would love to hear from you! You can answer in the comments, DM me, and subscribers to this Substack can email me via this post if you get it in your inbox!

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Fear. It can make us do things that we think are logical at the time, but are viewed as “crazy”, “insane”, “way too out there”, etc. Flight…fight…freeze. Sometimes our fears make us run away from the problem. Sometimes our fears make us freeze. Sometimes our fears can come out in ways we may not expect: Sarcasm, screaming, violence…trolling people via online forums, chat rooms, social media, etc.

Let’s talk about these things.

Social media, as I personally remember it, has been around since the early 2000’s. Like many of my peers, I made a MySpace page, and then in 2007, two months before graduating high school, I made a Facebook page. I also, very briefly, had an AIM account. I vaguely remember hearing about Friendster, but I never made an account, and honestly probably wouldn’t have been able to as my internet usage was widely monitored by my dad, my mom and my stepdad at the time. Not that I would have intentionally gotten involved in anything nefarious, but it was probably a good thing overall that I never had the urge to make an account and find out.

However, I suspect that many of you reading this will probably remember the social media of the 1990’s. Back then, I didn’t really know anything about Chat Rooms, forums, etc. Hell, I don’t think that I became acquainted with forums until I started playing World of Warcraft in 2009! In the early 2000’s, my internet usage consisted of reading fan fiction, attempting to write my own Star Wars based fan fiction that will forever remain unpublished because it’s embarrassing as fuck, reading everything I could about Harry Potter, as well as astronomy. I was also obsessed with the latest images of Mars and Jupiter specifically, and anything Space.com, although the other planets also got my attention. Around that time was also when my interest in archaeology and Ancient Egypt gained momentum and is still ongoing. Fun times, the early 2000’s, for the continuous rise of the internet at least!

For this article, I did a bit of a dive into the history of the evolution of social media to understand why it appears to be becoming obsolete in its current form and to understand whatever it’s evolving into becoming. While I believe that giving critiques and criticism about how social media operates is healthy, I believe it’s also important to understand the beginning and evolution of Social Media as well. So let’s take a look at the history of social media before we get lost in the criticisms…aaaagain!

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Social Media-1960’s to 2015

Thanks to Wikipedia and the Almighty Google, I learned in my research that the first ever “social media” site was called SixDegrees. It was launched in 1997. However, a deeper dive down the Wiki rabbit hole has shown that that is not exactly true. While SixDegrees may have been the first social media site to become “popular”, I found that the first official social media can actually be traced back to around 1995, about 2 years prior to SixDegrees.com. That would be Classmates.com², which I vaguely remember hearing about.

However, in my research, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that from a historical perspective, social media (as we know it today) appears to have evolved from chat rooms back in the 1960’s/1970’s. I’m not sure why it surprised me because it makes sense if you think about it:

-Imagine: You’re chatting with multiple people online in different chat boxes, you find yourself accidentally sending a response to someone that was meant for someone else, chaos and misunderstandings become reality. You find yourself wishing that you had one space where you could make a comment and the people you want seeing it (and perhaps others you may not want seeing it too) respond to it in their own time, you can respond back to the people who commented, and there is less chaos and misunderstandings. There’s probably definitely still drama, but now the issue is out in the open and you know where someone stands (or not-stands) about something. Bada Be Bada Boom! Social media motherfuckers!

-Yes, that example is not the exact story, but I think it’s a good example of the general idea of how social media became how it is today.

Anyways, my Wikipedia mini DD³ brought me to a page with an actual timelime of the evolution of social media. I am going to put a link to the list as a footnote, but I also want to do a brief list. Most of these are from the United States, but there are a few from other countries as well:

~1973: Talkomatic and TERM-Talk using the PLATO-sytem⁴. There was also a bulletin forum called PLATO Notes that was invented.
~1974: ARPNET which “evolved into the Internet…” <taken straight from the Wiki page>
~1980’s: Bulletin Board System, FidoNet, IRC
~1990’s: Classmates.com, LunarStorm (Sweden), Hotline, ICQ (Israel), Bolt.com, SixDegrees.com, Open Diary, AOL Instant Messenger (aww, AOL⁵ booting up sound nostalgia!), Yahoo! Messenger (Aww, that “Yaaaahoooo!” sound nostalgia!), MSN Messenger, LiveJournal
~2000-2015: Habbo, Friends Reunited (United Kingdom-or Queendom at the time), Windows Messenger, LinkedIn, Hi5, 4chan (an imageboard), Myspace, Skype, Facebook, Orkut (owned by teh Google), Youtube, Qzone (China), Reddit, Renren (China), Twitter, VK <VKontakte> (Russia), Nasza Klasa (Poland), Tumblr, Justin.tv (livestream), Sina Weibo (China), Instagram, Snapchat, Google+, Twitch, Tinder (date-app), Vine, Slack, Yik Yak, 8chan, Patreon, Google Hangouts, Musical.ly, Periscope, Discord, Meerkat…

…and many more! You can read the full list (goes all the way to 2024) via the link in the footnote⁶.

I don’t use Myspace anymore, but I still have an active Facebook page, Instagram, and I use Discord as well⁷. I have kind of (sort of) stepped away from Facebook, and only get on Instagram ever-so-often-rarely, and when I do, I very rarely comment or share/post stuff. Like, my last official Insta post was in 2020. I went and looked back on my Insta posting timeline-I joined in 2013, but apparently 2016 was the most that I have ever posted on that platform. In 2020, I did experiment with the Stories thing, but that was a blink-in-the-eye moment.

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Aight, now that we have reviewed the history of social media and its continuous evolution, let us discuss what makes us so damn fearful of this thing that has simultaneously united and divided the good people of this planet.

Pros and Cons

So what are the pros of social media that we can at least agree on? Hmm, let’s see: helps people connect with other people whom they normally may not connect with? Yupperz! Helps people find long-lost relatives and friends that they haven’t seen or talked to in years? Yupperz! And no, these first two are not necessarily related to each other. These two are the two biggest factors that I personally have observed about social media. Two biggest negative factors about social media? The obvious, of course: the unfortunate spread of misinformation, and the disconnect we may feel to reality thanks to our addiction of doomscrolling and fomo⁸.

I also asked the Almighty Google if it knew of any positive/negative aspects of social media, and of course the search engine did not disappoint! It led me to an article that will be linked in the footnotes⁹, but it narrows down the pros and cons to a nice, neat little list. Granted, this article was written in 2022 and geared towards parents, but it can still apply to all of us:
~Pros:
-Connection
-Quick access to info and research
-Online learning, job skills, and content discovery¹⁰
-Civic engagement (Yes, it does still exist!)
-Marketing tools and opportunities for remote employment

~Cons:
-Used as replacement of human to human contact
-Cyber-bullying, which can lead to suicide (mostly for teens but also adults)
-Content that may not be appropriate for humans below the age of consent
-Addiction
-Body/Self-image issues (for all genders, not just two)

Another article I found, written this year, also mentioned that social media can be a place to spread but also correct misinformation¹¹, sell or protect information (that we voluntarily-let’s be honest here: most of the time-put on there ourselves), let’s us connect and talk to people from cultures outside our own which allows us to either confirm or change our minds and biases, and many makes many other points. Article link is in the footnote as well¹².

What Makes Us So Fearful About This Tool Made By Humans?

So why do we fear social media? Do we fear that this tool, just like AI, can be used to create and/or destroy something and/or rebuild something previously destroyed? Do we really fear it’s misuse by our leaders-who constantly misuse it for various things, mainly because they believe they won’t get caught?

Or is our fear of social media more of an us/we/them fear?

Us/We/They-the laypeople who don’t always necessarily use it for nefarious purposes.

Us/We/They-the people who keep this world turning more so than most of our so-called leaders.

I’m not talking about making change via war, insurrections, violent protests, etc. That’s the easy path to take, even though it doesn’t appear to be the easy way¹³. I’m talking about taking the much harder, road less traveled path-the path where we find common ground without twisting intentions to suit one group. I believe that’s what the intention of social media was suppose to be, and then somewhere along the way it got fucked up.

Let’s admit it: We, as a species, are self-saboteurs. And instead of taking personal responsibility, we intentionally turn to fear and we misuse social media (or any technology for that matter) for our own individual benefit, not necessarily for the benefit of the group. For fucks sake, people, let’s do better!

What brought on these thoughts and this musing, you might be asking yourself? Years of quietly observing, facepalming, silently screaming in frustration, more facepalming. You get the idea, hopefully. I didn’t mean to go into a rant. It just came out. I do understand that overall it’s a complex situation, which just makes me have to ask: Why the fuckity fuck do we make it so goddamn fucking complex?

During my class a few weeks ago, my professor said something that opened my eyes to the whole social media argument in a new way. I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t remember exactly what he said, but basically he mentioned that any new technology can be and is socially disruptive. Of course, he was talking about the emergence of lithics (stone tools) found at early Homo habilis sites (used as evidence of an early adaptation in the evolution of our species), but this can be attributed to any kind of technology, including social media. I will talk more about this in Part 3, but I wanted to share that tidbit with y’all here.

Now, that’s not to say that the companies-Facebook/Meta/Instagram, X-Twitter, Snapchat, BlueSky, etc-and their CEO’s are not also responsible for indulging our social media addiction. They are 100% responsible for their part in how we’ve come to view social media as a whole, as well as taking advantage and using the data that they collect to make more money. And should definitely be held accountable for the shit they like to pull!

I’ll end this article-essay on a more positive, less make-you-think-note-tice: If you are active in the social media aspect of Substack, it is-for the most part-exactly what social media was probably meant to be like.

Sure, you may find yourself automatically pointing out that Notes is still young, it’s still a cute, chubby baby learning to find its voice, etc (or would you consider Notes to be a toddler by now?). Yeah, it’s peaceful now, but as it grows, it’ll evolve into another Facebook, Twitter, etc. I understand that fear.

But you know who’s behind keeping Substack Notes the thought-provoking discourse, creative-inducing, artistically-inspiring, positive marketing, back and forth random conversations place it is? US-you, me, anyone who wants to make Substack Notes the safe space it still is. Sometimes people pose uncomfortable questions or advice or comments. Guess what? Just like on other social medias, You/Me/Us/We/They can choose how to respond, and if we even want to respond at all, especially if we feel attacked or uncomfortable. Most of us are uncomfortable using that dreaded Block button-on any social-but remember, it’s there for Our/Your peace of mind. Because let’s be honest: sometimes an individual/group does not give a shit about your side and they just want to fucking argue with you until the sun combusts and burns us all dead. I admit, I have had to use the Block button in Substack DMs a few times, as well as a pre-Substack DM moment. And I have yet to regret it.

Again, not everyone who argues with you wants to argue until you’re both dead. Those people will mostly agree to disagree with you and move on with their lives. I honestly like those people. They know when to stop pushing their points, or over-pushing their points, and move on. They may even acknowledge that you agree with them on some points, and acknowledge that you make some good points too. And then you both shake hands (aka <3 each other’s last comment) and move on. And everyone else who was following the conversation does the same thing. It’s a beautiful thing. We better not fucking sabotage this!

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On that note, thank you for reading this long-ass article that was suppose to be a lot shorter than it turned out to be. I hope you enjoy reading this article-essay as much as I enjoyed writing it. Below are the responses with the questions that were asked. Feel free to answer the questions in the comments, or DM me! Also, the Halloween post will be coming out probably by next weekend. I’ve had some more things come up that have made me delayed me working on it. I know, it’ll be past Halloween and technically November, but technically Halloween is part of the Fall season, soooooo we’ll just put it as you’ll get not one but TWO fall-themed article-essays for this season from this Stack of Subs! Holy pumpkin-spiced-latte-chocolate-cake-pop-hot-chocolate-season Batman!

Carpe Diem and Huzzah!
~Kimber, Nalia, and Salem

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Below are the answers that my mom, Dylan, Jeanine, Nadia, and Jeff sent me about their experience with social media via the 1990’s- earlyish to midish 2000’s. Thank y’all again for answering the questions! I feel that your willingness to answer and allow me to include your answers here will enrich this post! For anyone who wishes to answer the questions, they will be posted again after the answered questions!

Before we get to their answers, here are the questions that I asked:

1.) Fellow Musers, who were born before 1985:
→If you were active on sites that were considered social media in the 90’s, which sites were you active on? Were you active on any forums in the 90’s and if so, which ones?

2.) Fellow Musers born in 1985 to 2005 (or are over the age of 18):
→What do you remember about social media throughout the 1990’s through let’s say 2019? What was/were the first social media(s) that you signed up for? If you remember forums, were you part of any forums?

3.) For anyone who has not ever had a social media page or joined a forum:
→what was the first social media and/or forum that you remember hearing about? What was the deciding factor in not joining social media(s) and/or forum(s)?

Responses:

My Mom: About social media or not-In the early 1990’s, the company I worked for introduced “inter office messaging ”.  We were able to message people in other offices (in other cities).  It doesn’t sound like much now but it was a big deal back then.  Just thought I’d share. So not really social media but maybe “social office”?

Me: Thanks for giving an answer to my question💞I think that would be considered an early form of Instant Messaging (IM), which has now evolved/changed to be called Direct Messaging (DM). I did mean to include a question about IM/DM, and I forgot🤦‍♀️ Do you remember what the Chat system was called? Or was it simply called "inter-office messaging"? It's okay if you don't remember, I'm just curious😊

Mom: You're probably right. That’s sounds better to call it inter office messaging. Dm. I don’t remember what it was called. But i do think it had a name that <Company> gave it.

=>.<=

Jeff: I was around before the 80’s. Social media in the beginning was chat sites. That’s in the 90’s. I guess the first website like facebook was MySpace didn’t join it but had been on it. I also remember an instant messaging program called ICQ in the last 90s. AOL, Prodigy, Excite all had chat areas in their systems. You could DM people in them also. I used Prodigy and Excite chatting system. As well as ICQ

Me: I remember AOL and there was an IM called AIM. Doing my research, I cam across a wikipedia page that said that supposedly the first "official" social media was called SixDegrees.com. Did you ever see that site or interact with it?

Jeff: It was there but never used it. There was a more current app like tic tok called periscope I used it to watch tours of Europe’s museums live and you could ask questions, but for some reason it was shut down.

Me: Interesting. I remember during the height of the pandemic, museums came up with creative ways to let people view their galleries from all over the world

Jeff: I was following this guy that was doing the tours. He also showed where Jim Morrison lived and his headstone. As well as other area of Europe

Me: Noice!

Jeff: It was

Me: So according to a brief Wikipedia search, Periscope was deactivated in 2021 due to decline in use, but it's still a feature of the Former-Bird-Site-That-Was-Once-Twitter

Jeff: Nice thing about it was there was no time limit they had to record or do a live event and live events could be viewed later if you could be there when live

Me: Damn, sounds like it was an almost perfect app, haha

=>.<=

Jeanine:
My first social media site was Facebook. I only joined Twitter (long ago when I published my first novel) and primarily to promote the book with their Writers Lifts, which bypasses all the madness of the daily headlines etc. Eventually branched into IG. And now of course, Substack, as I suppose it's considered social media, but such a kinder gentler more humane and FAR OUT version! I think it's what social media SHOULD be.

I never used forums or chat rooms. Owning a bookstore I had daily input from international customers from everywhere since the store was in Mexico, between Cancun and Tulum. So it was my "real time" chat room ):

Also, internet in those days was spotty at best. Mexico is old school. (that's why we moved there, to sidestep the hustle-bustle world). But along those lines of social media, the first website publisher I met, Ron Mader from planeta.com, came into my store and asked if I'd do articles (posts today) about Mexico, travel, the Maya and pyramids. I had what would now be called a blog on his planeta.com site that I titled "Tales from the Yucatán." More or less like my Substack today, Mexico Soul.

Since Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from 4 major pyramid sites, on our days off it was easy to travel to them. I learned so much, plus I met archeologists, tour guides and scholars, locals who know the area, and I read voraciously (still do) about Mex and the Maya. I eventually began writing for local Mexico newspapers and guidebooks (Fodors). Then I branched into writing thrillers set in the Yucatán, with a female kick-butt protagonist, Layla Navarro.

Hope this helps!

Side Note: For new Fellow Musers, if you haven’t come across Jeanine’s Substack yet, I encourage you to go check it out. It’s called Mexico Soul!

=>.<=

Dylan:
1) I think the only social media I used was yahoo messenger to chat with maybe a friend or two from school; I don’t know if that counts as social media tho but if it does, then yeah
2) so I remember being on MySpace when it first came out! Then I guess Facebook was around 2009. It got big and the only reason I got into Facebook was because my friends did it lol. I was a MySpace diehard forever. I always hated twitter and insta, and never even mess around w/ TikTok. I did however spend tons of time on the RuneScape jagex forums back in the day. Then, eventually when I was older, I got on 4chan a lot, then eventually dog shit Reddit lmao
3) doesn’t really apply to me

Dylan: The chat message thing ties into response to question 1; but I do remember being super excited about hearing the notification ‘ding’ from yahoo messenger! I think back then I was a lot more needy and shy and it was just such a blessing to be able to think out my responses before I sent them, cause I felt like in real life I would panic in social interactions therefore thru the messenger I could articulate what I meant so much better without having to feel flustered

Me: Thank you for your answers and your permission to use them, my love <3

Me: I feel that Chat/Messenger was an early form of social media since people used it to communicate wit each other in real time via the internet. Would you say that SnapChat is/was a form of social media or more like a Chat room in app form?

Dylan: Man it’s hard to say, I think originally it was just used for chat BUT I would argue now it’s a influencer/social media thing because ppl always try to use stories to drive engagement with individuals and often times corporate products too. So I kinda see it as a hybrid I guess, lol

Me: I completely agree with your assessment :D

=>.<=

Nadia:
I was born in 1989 and the first forum I signed up for ever was a Sims forum and met some friends around my age (I think I was not even a tween). Then there was teenopendiary.com and I was 12 when I joined that. You could write blog posts kind of like this and interact with others via comments on the blog posts. I guess after that FB came around the time I was 16-17. It was wildly different then and maybe more pleasant.

Side Note: For new Fellow Musers, if you haven’t come across Nadia’s Substack yet, I encourage you to go check it out. It’s called when hope writes!

=>.<=
The Questions, should anyone else like to answer them!

1.) Fellow Musers, who were born before 1985:
→If you were active on sites that were considered social media in the 90’s, which sites were you active on? Were you active on any forums in the 90’s and if so, which ones?

2.) Fellow Musers born in 1985 to 2005 (or are over the age of 18):
→What do you remember about social media throughout the 1990’s through let’s say 2019? What was/were the first social media(s) that you signed up for? If you remember forums, were you part of any forums?

3.) For anyone who has not ever had a social media page or joined a forum:
→what was the first social media and/or forum that you remember hearing about? What was the deciding factor in not joining social media(s) and/or forum(s)?

Bonus question for everyone:
4.) If you are active on Substack Notes, do you consider it to still be a cute, chubby baby or well into it’s toddler phase? I’d REALLY love to know your thoughts on this!

1. Futurama, Season 12 Episode 4: Beauty and the Bug

2. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classmates.com

3. DD=Deep Dive

4. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

5. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

6. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_social_media

7. I would not recommend friending me on any of these places <aka just don’t>unless we are for sure friends and have had multiple conversations via Substack or real-life. Otherwise you will be in Add-As-Friend-Limbo forever…and do you really want to be in that limbo? It’s not very fun, tbh. Also, as a personal rule I have, if you ain’t using your real name or you haven’t told me what other social media names you use prior to friend-requesting me, then don’t bother sending me a friend request in those spaces. You can call me a cautious-as-fuck-motherfucker all you want, but I ain’t that fool, fool.

8. FOMO-Fear Of Missing Out

9. Article: Pros and Cons of Social Media

10. Youtube has actually helped me a few times when I’ve needed to learn how to fix something

11. Google Definition: noun misinformation
-false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.
—Given Example: Nuclear matters are often entangled in a web of secrecy and misinformation

12. Article: Impact of Social Media: Advantages and Disadvantages [2024]

13. Loss of life is never easy, and I am in no way suggesting or saying that violence is the easiest path forward. I’m simply trying to say that intentionally finding common ground without the intention of twisting the communication to benefit a group/individual over other groups/individuals is something that we could do better at, as we do consider ourselves an “intelligent” species.