Supportive Social Media

Old Men statue in Vigelands Park

I read an article at Fusion recently, “Inside the elite, super-secret world of L.A.’s coolest girls on Facebook“, which bubbled somehow in the mystery brain that is Facebook to me. I didn’t read it at first. Indeed, I scrolled right past quickly – that headline screams Not for you! To me. But then it bubbled again, and this time I noticed that the first comment was “this is just a tiny piece, but when you start putting it all together you start to understand why Donald Trump might become president”. Which is fine. Maybe it’s true. But because the article’s title suggested to me that this wasn’t aimed at men, and the first comment was a man railing against it, I, out of sheer contrarianness, clicked through to read it. And… It was really interesting. Go read it now – but come on back afterwards, ok?

The article’s still not really for me – that’s fine. But, where I was expecting some vapid pop-culture look at L.A.’s female cultural elites interacting in some sort of elitist and annoying way, it actually turns out (spoiler alert!) to be about how these women have found a way to, in some ways, mandate openness and supportiveness across social media. It’s completely unsurprising that it is a private group. It is  interesting that this is just built on top of Facebook, leveraging, a fairly standard feature, rather than being some sort of an exclusive purpose-built app that we’re always hearing is the next….

And it got me thinking about supportive male culture (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). This is something that I’ve chatted with my older brother a few times, and, even more rarely, a close friend. But here’s how fucked up this is: I can’t even imagine broaching the topic of having more open, supportive conversations with my male friends for fear of ridicule, derision, or, worse, incomprehension and indifference.

The idea of this sort of group is terrifying to me: which is the point, really. Male culture is so competitive, so divorced from our own fears and feelings. This sense I have of having to project this successful, confident, perhaps stoic version of myself to compete with the successful, confident images the other men I know project is incredibly tiring. But I love the idea of being able to connect – and for me, that it is mostly a written, asynchronous medium is key – with other men for support on virtually any topic is amazing.

To be honest, I’m not sure I could do it – I’m broken in all the standard ways. I don’t even want to give examples of things I might want to share, because, well, this is public and I can’t do it. And have you ever searched for something like “men’s groups”? It’s a fucking nightmare of Men’s Rights Activists on one hand, and horrendous survivor (usually abuse, but others too) groups (horrendous because of what the men who have earned those groups had to go through to get there, not because of themselves: these are important). And, of course, until this article, even this group was secret (if an open one?) so how would I find it? And, again – could I even do it? I can certainly imagine being supportive, but the idea of taking that leap and asking. Whoa. Worse: the thought of joining a group of geographic locals (who’re likely mostly strangers) is daunting, but the thought of joining a group of the men I currently know and doing something like this is essentially inconceivable: mostly because of my  (likely false) perceptions of how they present themselves to me.

And maybe this is just me. Maybe most guys have that someone who’ll they’ll tell anything, but, anecdotally, my friends who’re married, the women share so much more intimate, private concerns between themselves then we husbands do. But I can’t help but feel that this is a part of how broken contemporary masculinity is – that dependence is weakness, that sharing is weakness.  I don’t know how to change it. I work hard on this in myself – but I’m clearly not doing well at it, or well, this post probably wouldn’t exist.

Fixing “View All”

Lots of websites paginate their stories  – we all know the so-called justifications for why – so I won’t expand on that argument. However, many also helpfully include a “view all” link at the footer of each page so that if you want to view the whole story on one page you can (aside: with the various time-delay readers like Instapaper or Reader mode in Safari, this might be moot now, but I still use it a fair bit).

Unfortunately, these “View All” links are totally, and totally unnecessarily, broken. Have a look at this recent Wired article: “3-D for your ears”. It’s split into 3 pages, and at the bottom is one of those links. But when I click on it, it reloads the entire page, and leaves me at the top, not where I was.

I understand their desire to do a whole page refresh – in the game of page-view-counts, one more view is presumably a good thing. But their internal CMS must also know how/where a page splits – as it provides a split option. And we have the ability in HTML to link to any arbitrary point on a page via an Anchor Link. So why not tag the bottom of each page with an anchor – something as basic as “page1”. In the View All, you could then link me to the anchor link for the page , using the #page1 anchor link. You still get your extra page view, but you don’t annoy me in the process by making me find where I was in the now much larger content block.

I think the best solution of these “View All” links would be to simply load in the rest of the content in the current page via AJAX call – so the content simply stretches down – less bandwidth for everyone involved, and significantly more “refined” feeling in practice – but as I said, that doesn’t help the page-view-count game.

Because these view all solutions are currently such an annoyance, I find myself clicking the “Reader” button in Safari on almost every site I go to that paginates their stories. But for much the same reason I was never big on reading sites in RSS readers, I don’t particularly like this interface. I like the content to be snuggled in the chrome it was intended to be in.

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