I am suffering from social media fatigue

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly

Sigh. OK, let's start backwards, I joined Facebook so late to avoid reading people's corny posts. By late I mean very late. Also, I discovered a loop - only "friends of friends" can add me as a friend, so I added one friend and deleted him, so basically my profile is ghost and only serves to manage the official page of this blog there. X? I follow no one. Instagram - 26 people - but basically lost most of my audience when my account got hacked. Linkedin is a different story, I used to enjoy there. Now it is just a dump of all the facebook cast-offs. 

I admit though, even if the amount of people I follow on Instagram was very restricted I used to love scrolling and just calm my mind from the different causes of stress in my life, which not only all Lebanese face, but also have some very specific to my life. It was an escape and a release. Bit by bit though, with everything becoming video and AI, the compulsion to numb my brain started becoming irritating. As I try to find the latest posts about retro toys, or the broadcast of the newest men's Prada show, I had to endure an enormous amount of senseless videos, erroneous information, a lot of interjected threads stories (mostly written by AI) and so on.

So all in all, whereas I was very sheltered - no Facebook friends, no people to follow on X, relatively few additions to my Instagram original feed, and - what otherwise was pleasurable posts on Linkedin... Now I am suffering from extreme social media fatigue what's with everything becoming clogged with extra unneeded information.

I own a very old iPhone 7SE (yes, I know i must change it but I keep delaying that), but it also has two screens one after the other - yesterday I moved Instagram to the other unseen page to avoid seeing the app and (absent-mindedly) check it. Also, I own a one-thousand plus book strong library of which about 600 were already read. I took some extra books. I may or may not read them but at least my OCD personality cannot notice Instagram and be triggered. As for Linkedin, sadly the people I love to read there get lost in the new algorithm offering me posts I never signed up for. I just checked as to how many people I unfollowed and the list is humongous but the new algorithm just keeps spewing posts from people I never signed up for. 

There's too much lecturing, too much drawing conclusions - either on Instagram or Linkedin - from facts that never align. Sure like with anywhere, there is a very interesting amount of information, the problem is now finding it and sorting it when there is little time or patience for that.

I am truly suffering from information, or rather useless information, fatigue. 

Someone offered my a copy of Ulysses by James Joyce a long time ago. I shall begin to read it in earnest "I will yes" (if you know you know).

On that Jamhour students' dust up!

I know, call me retro or whatever but I stand with the Jamhour management on this one. So, here's the background - there's this guy from Andalus restaurant who comes on social media with his inflammatory videos. Fine, no big deal such people are a dime a dozen. Then, in a recent video who is behind but... College Notre Dame de Jamhour students (CNDJ) - clad in their official school uniforms participating in the prank.

I am going to be honest, the circular the school issued to parents does not say if they students were outright fired, or suspended, or reprimanded. This came from the rector of the secondary classes. Whatever it is though, I stand with the school on this one. I know that social media has took off a lot of decorum from a lot of aspects, but believe it or not, I still believe that people ought to behave publicly, especially when "representing" an institution (and CNDJ is not one light-hearted institution, far from it).

The prank is annoying, let us face it, but also youth a very influenceable and gullible, and whereas top schools such as CNDJ prepare them for high careers (about a third of our current government are CNDJ graduates), maybe the youth themselves see such a vulgar film as something fun and that no one will care in the future.

Who knows? But sadly, the prank is silly. And yes, it was idiotic to do it while wearing the school uniform!

Lush and the scent of Lebanon

A giant smell diffusing pot which is not AI? Yes please. And yes it is happening this weekend. Lush and Joe Fish went for over-oversize. Lush, inventor of bath bombs, has had no social media presence since 2019, so the challenge was to still make it out there, without being too chi chi about it. Apparently Lush are already on the ground with a shop in Beirut Souks which got hit severely in the 2020 explosion that destroyed Beirut as well as the ABC malls. Did it work? I believe it did. Now of course, this category is more "luxury" in Lebanon these days due to the state of the market and the consumer but what do I know? Perhaps it has a large chunk and I am not aware. Still, it is lovely to see them reach - literally - above and beyond. Apparently the pot is destined to smell like the Lush shops which you can detect hundreds of meters away.

Lebanon: Hey, where are all the "influencers"?

Well, two theories: Either I am completely in the dark, or.... All the influencers in Lebanon have gone astray!

Well, I admit - I have no Tiktok - so maybe anyone who is anyone has migrated there from Instagram. But I doubt, as in, really doubt. Because on Instagram all your usual "influencers" are nowhere to be seen. Sure, sure, there's this detergent ad which rounded up half-a-dozen of them to share mother laundry tips, there's this and that restaurant mostly offering free meals in exchange for mentions, but by and large, the whole I-am-mentionning-a-product-on-social-media-because-I-have-followers has really gone to the deep end in Lebanon.

As I said, it did not completely disappear, but it might as well have!

Of course, that the whole communication industry in Lebanon is in psuedo-tatters at this point (official figures suggest an ad spend of 4.5 USD/person while industry veterans go down to a real 2.5 USD/person in 2021 - here) while the latest Army Day crop of ad left us with an incredibly bad taste (and a sad harbinger for what is to come in terms of quality of communication - here).

I do remember a time when a certain "influencer" put an official Christmas photo of her family right when the crisis in Lebanon was starting and the whole situation deepening - the photo was of her with her husband and kids next to the Christmas tree with a bottle of a certain brand right smack next to them on the low table. If this is not the worst product placement in the history of the universe, it might as well be. This brings back to my mind the funny scene in The Truman Show with the built-in "Mococoa" ad (please see here). A mixture of surreal settings, mercantilism, and - yes, this is a moral judgement - using your family for money.

And for a while, let us not forget, the money was indeed good. I have said it before on this space, but will repeat it, when I suggested that paid ads and endorsements by "influencers" should be declared as such, certain people attacked me viciously in Lebanon and laughed about me in their own (now defunct) magazine. Only a couple of months later, the EU made this mandatory for companies to declare the money they pay for such people, and for them (influencers) to declare openly when it is an advertising tie-in.

But all this seems to come from some "ancient past" - read 3 years ago. Companies are cutting spending corners as much as they can, and certainly lavishing money on ever-dwindling social media reach is now beyond their budget. Once more, I could be wrong about this, but any survey of social media accounts can verify what I am saying.

When such people stop posting for more than two months, and when their last photo was of an unsponsored family holiday in Europe, you know we have reached the end of the line. 

The other theory? 

"Everyone became an influencer and there's no one left to influence"....

So, how is social media helping Ukraine?

I know writing this post is counter-intuitive for someone who has the oldest still running blog in Lebanon. But hang in there with me. Yes, I realize that getting the Ukrainian stories across via the media is very important and I am all for it. I keep refreshing The Guardian page umpteen times a day to get new info. And yes, I love that story about the "Snake Island" who told the Russians to go "f*ck themselves" or the man who stood in front of a tank a la Tiananmen square.

But on the flip side, Twitter is just full of hashtags about the crisis, and every other post on Linkedin (literally every other post) is about Urkaine, thankfully I am shielded from what is going on on Facebook as I have zero friends there but can only imagine the calamity, oh and Instagram has stories upon stories (because apparently it is now more fashionable to post stories) about the country. 

My question is: How will this be more successful than the #bringbackourgirls just go name one movement which started and ended online with zero action on the ground. I know not. This blogpost is just the utmost of hypocrisy: Here I am writing about it with zero effect. But at least I recognize that.

And it saddens me we are confusing posting online with actually doing something meaningful on the ground even if - I am the first to admit it - there is little to nothing I can do.

"Liking isn't helping" said that wonderful Crisis Relief Singapore ad. Isn't it time we admit it?

SyncIthra - on social media, bullying and Mozart

SyncIthra (via Leo Burnett MEA) gets the wonderful idea, but through the wrong specimen.

OK, so the idea first: A certain Amadeus Mozart (to begin with this is the wrong appellation, his name was Wolfgang to anyone who knew him!) is training on the piano but has his cell phone next to him. And despite wonderful playing - he is being criticized online while he livestreams (on Insta presumably). At some point he loses faith, throws his notes and runs to his mother's bosom.

Well, all this is fine and dandy, but honestly does not apply to Mozart at all. Anyone who read anything about Mozart knows that at that age he was already in king's courts, needed no practicing, and that he was also too indulgent, frivolous and self-assured for any of this banter. Now, if this had applied to the German writer Goethe however, the scenario would have been very plausible as he was the one who kickstarted the whole "mal du siecle" syndrome. Anyone bullying a young Goethe online would have destroyed him. A young Mozart did not give a toss!

As I said, good ad, wrong specimen. See the ad here.

We no longer read, we react.

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly from the series Tanaklogia

We no longer read, we react.

I found that to be very true lately. Which is why I stopped writing comments on Instagram, something I actually enjoyed. Several times people reacted to my comments without fully understanding them, isolating them from the bigger picture of who I was, or what my blog always preached, simply for the pleasure of some self-righteous justification they feel they deserve.

Let me give this example. A certain person on Instagram contacts me privately, either with "Tarek?" or without even a message at all. Just a picture is attached. The idea would be to locate where that picture was taken. Several minutes later the answer would be "Bhamdoun, look at the photo of the elections candidate, his name is so and so, and he was a prominent politician in the area at the time", or "oh too easy, this is two streets away from AUB, the building is still there right now". Which is why I feel it is a pleasure to write public comments on his posts.

In one of my comments I used the word "nawar". A girl replied schooling me that they were an actual population of "roma" whose name was abstracted to mean certain kind of people. In return I thanked her and said that her using "roma" was incorrect as they are now rebaptized as "travellers" (for those who do not know "roma" is a newer name for gypsies). I thought the exchange ended there...

And then all hell broke lose. I had tens of people scolding me for being ignorant, racist, this, that, in the end I deleted my original comment because it was not worth it to be subjected to a trial by people completely ignorant of the facts.

Here's another story. Again, Instagram. Will not bore you with the details. But in a private exchange with someone I mentioned that Robespierre was himself a victim of the guillotine he so long operated and sent people to - as a way to tell them to tamper their enthusiasm about how they were labelling people online. Next thing I know they were tagging me and the Internal Security Forces in a public story that I was threatening them with "death". How this lead to that is still beyond me in terms of logic - if there ever was one.

But still, it was but one of the many examples of how people are taking up arms for - well, nothing. Just twisted imaginings projected onto other people. But these instinctive reactions people are having are truly perplexing. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said it perfectly in her essay "It Is Obscene" (which I wholeheartedly invite you to read here): "People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself (...), while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’"

And complexity and nuance are really what are needed (see here), I read it somewhere online that if you say you like apples, does not mean you are "preaching" you hate mangoes. Chill people there is enough space and tastes for everyone to cohabitate on the internet. In a scientific book published in 1929 the author wrote (sadly did not keep the book) "peaches are the tastiest of all fruits". Can you imagine learning that as a student and realizing your prefer - heaven forbids - bananas? Thankfully, social media was not invented in 1929. Can you imagine what it would be for someone to "cancel" bananas?

Government confidence vote: Slacktivism at its worst

Source

So everyone is changing their Facebook avatar to "la thika" (no confidence) in reference to the confidence vote session of the government (the joke of course is that phonetically it resembles Lecico the sanitary wares company). This reminds me of  "liking isn't helping" - the Crisis Relief Singapore ad which illustrated that liking something online has no implication on the actual situation, ergo a mere act of slacktivism (slack-activism). I am not being a defeatist, but how such a move online will get translated on the ground is beyond me.

Bonjus does the #DollyPartonChallenge

So Bonjus did the #dollypartonchallenge (which is about which photo to put on which social media - linkedin, Facebook, instagram, and Tinder). How could this tie to the core brand message is beyond me. But it's a fad so brands will be on it. Still, I find it odd how much brands are relying on hypes and events as opposed to having a clear message to stick to.