In both my professional and personal life, I take pride in being like a penguin. Through lurking on the occasionally educational app TikTok, I have learned that I, like the noble penguin, deepen my bonds with friends and colleagues through pebbling. On a David Attenborough level, pebbling is a gift-giving ritual where one bird brings pebbles to a mate to (hopefully) use as the cornerstone for building nests. It is a very romantic sentiment that stood no chance against being co-opted by TikTok-speak to explain why people can go days at a time without meaningful conversation but share memes, funny videos, or the dreaded news article just to show we’ve been thinking of someone. This brings me to my "old man yells at cloud" blog about how turned off I am by how I'm constantly pushed to connect when I don't want to.
It is not courageous to say that social media has lost the plot on why we use it: to connect to each other. These days, Twitter is mostly advertisements promoting right-wing politicians, AI-generated "art," or straight up porn sandwiched between bots copy-pasting the same comments to each other. However, I can withstand any challenge as long as I have small joys like fan art, memes, and videos to share with friends. But I’ve recently reached a point where I’ve avoided my friends because of how invasive the internet’s approach of constant connection has become.
Last week, I got into a weird little spat with my best friend over liking a Hasanabi reel on Instagram. This isn’t all that rare, and we’ve even stopped bringing him up to avoid arguments about the himbo’s approach to talking about socialist politics while being rich. But what was weird was how they even knew I liked the video in the first place. (For those curious, it was a video of Hasan twerking with Kaho Shibuya.) When I asked them about it, they told me it was because Instagram Reels has a built-in feature that shows you videos your friends have liked. When I looked up how to opt out of the feature, I was pissed to learn that I couldn’t and disheartened to read folks say they just don’t like videos anymore, entirely to avoid awkward conversations with friends.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a very small drop in the pond for how invasive and all-encompassing internet culture has become, but it still pisses me off that I can’t even have the joy of pebbling anymore because Reels has a built in tab that shares post I’ve liked with my friends the moment I like them. Sure, there’s something funny about my friend seeing me thirst over Hasan throwing his double-wide ass in a circle, and it gave us an opportunity to talk about how my bisexual yearning led to our spat, but that doesn’t change the fact that even a friend I’ve shared plenty of kitchen conversations about life with has no business knowing about my likes without my saying so. If I didn’t share it with them, I didn’t want them to see it, regardless of whether or not the internet thinks it's doing me a solid by broaching the connection for me.
Hell, even the act of leaving a friend on read when they pebble posts to me comes with the sting of expectation thanks to the “seen” prompt. It used to be that you wouldn’t see a friend until you encountered them in the wild and gave a quick hi-bye or made plans to hang out. Now, I’ve been conditioned to worry I’ve betrayed a friendship by not replying the moment I get a notification that a friend sent me something.
Human beings are social creatures, and being able to connect with one another is one of the best parts about the internet. But the internet’s incessant need to streamline and optimize how I connect with friends by sending me notifications the moment they’re active on TikTok, posting new stories on Instagram, or liking the same video as me is has turned those real friendships into supervised ones and that fucking sucks.
