emulate me
i'll emulate you
i can be the sky, you'll be the sea
we'll both be blue
mirror me
i'll reflect on you
i attended a ballet boarding school for high school. it's the kind of environment that forces deep bonds through close proximity and sharing (and oversharing). i passed a letter to a friend who had always kept respectable emotional distance. the only part i remember from that note was:
friends are reflections and i hope we can serve as mirrors for each other.
she was rightfully confused.
at a school for ballet, we all had a special relationship with mirrors. everyone gravitated to specific locations in the room, determined by social hierarchy and bending glass. this positioning was essential and algorithmically complex: for some, the mental gains of the long legs, vertically elongating mirror offset the immense pressure of standing next to the prodigy. parents would often be mortified (yet undeniably impressed) by their teen's management of optics, interpersonal dynamics, and the subtle distortions of the studio mirrors. suffice it to say that being in ballet is knowing a few people psychologically destroyed by what they thought they saw in a mirror.
as a has-been professional mirror-gazer, i've grown quite distrusting of reflections. as a greater secular trend, i've lost my belief in a true knower, a one true witness who would help me see me. and like most, i sampled what social media could offer me.
i would characterize the average social media experience as looking into thousands of shitty little mirrors. i can't say the idea of building an image in the aggregate is bunk. this kind of "pointillism" can clearly work though i've never quite figured it out. i deign to blame the tools here to save some face. a broken mirror is altogether different from a broken clock - it might never, ever be right.
River is not a mirror. you might see your reflection but it's not its function and its not why it's there.
on the surface, you can perform most of the same creative actions on River as other social media sites—post text, images, responses. i initially disregarded it as just another microblogging platform. but there are few visible metrics. i have no idea how many people see a post. there's no algorithmic reinforcement feeding back what works. i'm not being funneled toward demographic twins. and when it's time, the post disappears from attention, carried away by River's endless scroll.
when i joined, i thought the following count on my profile was people following me but it’s the number of channels you follow. engagement not audience. that inversion matters. the effect on behavior is conscious decoupling from pristine image management. the digital image doesn't really matter in a tangible sense. people post drafts, works in progress, half-formed thoughts. you owe no continuity or polish to a body of followers. this is what i like about River—less pressure to project a specific image.
i never got closer to that friend. it was either an act of grace or soft-handed refusal of intimacy on her part. this has done little to deter me. i'm still writing letters to connect. i'm still compulsively checking mirrors while complaining about all the mirrors. i've just realized i don't want a bigger, better mirror. i just want to post the broad gestures of something i worked on or something i saw. i want to shoot the shit. i just want to see these posts glide on down River.