Nerd Zone

These are very disjointed thoughts — which is very ironic, in light of what I want to talk about specifically — but as I've taken more time to explore this platform, which is a much, much slower form of social media than what I've been used to, I've been thinking a lot more about eloquence: in particular, how it's a skill that can be trained, which takes the sort of patience that most popular social media platforms simply don't encourage.

And what I'm specifically thinking about in relation to that is a tendency I've found in myself to freeze up before I write a post on my social media platform of choice, to type in words and then to delete them immediately, to decide that, in the end, I'll have to keep this thought I've wanted to share entirely to myself for the time being because I've yet to find the perfect way to express them.

This is obviously connected to larger social-media-surveillance-panopticon mentalities or whatever you call them, but in this case what I'm talking about originates less from the angle of fear, and more of perfectionism: I want all my thoughts on a topic to be exhausted on the page, I want to leave no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored, etc etc. I'm not even exhausting the bulk of all I've thought on this particular topic right now, and am currently forcing myself to keep typing and to not delete the whole post so that I at least manage to share something.

But most importantly, it's about not being able to escape the fact that you need clarity and precision in your writing to be persuasive; and persuasion is how you build an audience! Which, for the most part, is what we're all looking for when we post online.

As I've mentioned, it's a skill to be able to write convincingly, which means that it can be practiced! But the thing about practice is that it also takes a lot of patience, and nowadays, understandably, we find ourselves having less and less of it. It's first come first served in the social media landscape as well as in life in general, and often the attention we seek depends entirely on how fast we can work to get it. I think a lot of my own online anxiety — and very likely that of others as well — is about seeing so much of the rewards that we forget that reaping them requires sustained work and effort. In this case, being inarticulate about a topic that you nonetheless have a lot of passion for makes the prospect of sharing your thoughts very disappointing and embarrassing, because you're guaranteed a limited and tentative audience.

(and obviously, much of this also depends on the actual topic and how interested people are in it, but you can still turn away another passionate defender of your own positions with a badly-worded argument, or draw someone into something they've never even considered with the right turn of phrase)

And this is pretty much just build-up for what actually made me think about all this, which is a common sentiment I've seen on Twitter/Tumblr among people in my shared fandoms who themselves seem to freeze up whenever they want to ramble about, say, their favourite character, a plot element they really enjoyed in the story they're fixating on, etc. All because they just can't find the right words; that is, they're not worried about response, and more the lack of it.

I'm not myself really looking for solutions on how to get over this hurdle, because I feel like I've already found them: a lot of weathering my own expectations, improving how I build arguments by structuring them in drafts before I post things that are lengthier, etc— but, once again, there's a lot of patience involved in it. And with the way most social media is structured, that favours immediate response and gratification, I just feel sorry for a lot of people who do fandom on them that feel, like I often have, that they have less to say because they just don't know how to say it.

Also! I do think it helps to be braver about being inarticulate and not too eloquent sometimes. It's often that I find that a lot of what I've said that sounds too ramble-y to my ears has actually been understood by the people I happen to be talking to. There's also that aspect, of trusting that people will understand where you're getting at.

( obligatory things I say to appease the posting anxiety )