Blog / 2025 / My Unpopular Opinion about Social Media

January 13, 2025

[video transcript]

I still end up commenting publicly now and again, and I mostly enjoy it, because I’m doing it on Patreon or Mastodon, a platform which isn’t owned by a billionaire and which is explained in greater detail here. That said, since I quit Instagram and corporate social media a few years ago, I’ve been surprised by how different private conversations really are. I think social media has trained us to believe that public conversations are often more desirable and useful than private ones, and that’s a shame.

I talk more about just how vital privacy is in this article. You can learn more about the public art project on the bridge in this post or watch the whole NJ.com video.

art and civil disobedience at the Alexauken Creek Spillway Bridge in the D&R Canal State Park, New Jersey
Gwenn Seemel
Rainbow Connection
2024
acrylic on paper applied with wheatpaste glue
5 x 1500 inches
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Here’s my unpopular opinion: commenting on social media is weird. I’m not saying that nobody should ever do it. I’m just saying that this idea that we communicate in writing with people we may or may not know very well and that we do that communicating with other people watching us doing that communicating, that’s just kind of odd. And what’s even more bizarre is we do it a lot.

Now I don’t think I’m giving you any kind of new information or something that’s outside of your experience when I reveal to you that sometimes, when I text with my best friends—people I love and who I know love me—sometimes when I text with them, we have misunderstandings. Because writing doesn’t always communicate all the things it needs to communicate.

So this idea that we, as a world, have decided to write to people we may or may not know that well and to do it with an audience and that that’s going to actually be—like, that’s not acutal communication! No. Just no!

So, this time last year I was in a very public interaction—public conversation kind of like what I’ve been describing except I wasn’t doing any writing, I was only arting. The person I was interacting with was writing. They were writing in ink and carving with a knife into a wooden bridge near my apartment. And the messages that they were writing were things like “Trump,” “MAGA,” stuff along those lines. And they’d been doing it for almost a year when I decided I needed to respond, with first bandaids to metaphorically heal the carving that they were been doing. And then eventually with rainbows when the bandaids only caused the vandal to write more stuff on the bridge.

The park that’s in charge of maintaining that bridge hadn’t been doing a good job for, like, a year as the vandal was writing all of this stuff on the bridge. And so when I started responding to the vandal, I decided I needed to get the press involved in order to make the park be interested in this thing that they’re supposed to be doing. And that’s where a lot of this footage that I’m showing you is from. It’s from an NJ.com video that was made about this interaction.

Before I started with the bandaids and the rainbows, for months I would walk this bridge and I would wonder who the person that was doing this was. Like, is it more than one person? Like, what are they like? What are they getting out of doing this? Why are they doing this? I wanted to ask them so many questions. But I didn’t know who they were and so I couldn’t. And so I decided to have a public conversation with them.

I don’t regret that public interaction that I had with that person, but a year later I still wish I knew who they were. I still wish that I could talk to them privately.

You know that saying “dance like nobody’s watching”? The idea being that you can move in a more genuine manner if you’re not worried about other people judging you. I think the saying should be: write directly to the person you want to respond to. It’s not as catchy obviously. But, when we do things publicly, there are pressures on us—social pressures, concepts of status—that I think interrupt deeper ways that our brains could explopre things.

So, yeah, my unpopular opinion is that commenting on social media is weird, maybe even bad. And what I would like for the world is more thoughtfulness, more thoughtful interactions, private ones.


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