Media Wrangling (Cecilia Peartree)

Because social media and the trials and tribulations associated with using the various options loom large in the novel I'm currently writing, I thought I would share what's been happening with my own social media accounts. They haven't caused me quite as much trouble as my characters are having in the novel, but I must admit to finding aspects of them a little baffling/annoying/anxiety-inducing just lately.

I've been using Twitter (X) and Facebook for some time. Although Twitter has been horrible lately in many ways, there are still some nice things about it. For instance at the time of writing I've just taken part in a hectic and very friendly discussion there with other writers and readers about cosy mysteries, using a hashtag to group all the relevant posts together. And then there are the cat and dog accounts, of course! I see that recently many of these have also appeared on other platforms, so I'm fairly confident that if/when I give up on Twitter I will still be able to follow Bertie Lakeland and Malcolm the Cat! However, the tone of debate in other areas has become more and more awful - much worse even than it was during Brexit - and that's the kind of thing that will drive me off the platform altogether if it doesn't improve. Also, Elon Musk.

Facebook is useful partly to keep in touch with family and friends, partly to find out what's going on locally - where else could you get a picture of the overturned car on the main road near us before any official news media have it? or contribute to a crowdfunder to get legal advice against the LTN? - and partly because they make it easy to set up and maintain pages for a local organisation I'm involved with and for my writing. Unfortunately it's become harder and harder to see the posts there that you really want to see because of the algorithm or something, and as with Twitter, you catch sight of something interesting as you scroll past and then can never find it again.

I've also been theoretically using Instagram for a while but without liking it very much, and Threads more recently with a bit more engagement. Someone gave me a login code for bluesky at the time when many people were leaving Twitter, and it's rumoured that there's an active community of writers there, but I haven't had time to try it out. 

Substack appeared on my radar fairly recently and I've been trying hard to get to grips with it, despite finding it somewhat baffling. I have got off to a very slow start. Nothing is obvious at first when you go there - several 'home' options that seem to lead to different places depending on where you start from, and I wouldn't have had any clue about what to do if I hadn't read some hints on a writers' forum. Basically there are 'Notes' which are a little like tweets as you can like them and comment on them, and 'Posts' which are saved on the site and sent to subscribers via email. So it's a sort of cross between a social media site, a mailing list and a blog. Apologies to anyone who knows better than I do for that very quick summary. For some reason - possibly because I'm a newbie - a lot of the 'notes' that appear on my screen are from other people who are wondering what to do and how to get subscribers or to persuade anyone to take any interest! Many are also from writers. The two categories overlap quite a bit. I can see that the mailing list part of it works well, but I'm not entirely convinced yet by the blogging facilities, though I've been able quite easily to re-blog something from another site in the hope of finding a different audience. I'm not sure about having the time or energy to devote to it to make it work well. But that's probably the case with much of the internet, I suppose.