Me from earlier today on Mastodon:

There’s a certain type of compartmentalization to social media that I don’t like. For example: this account is only about static site generators, or this account is only pics of donkeys, or whatever. Do not like! I want to follow the person who is interested in static site generators AND donkeys. It’s guaranteed that they are much more interesting.

Behind this post is a vaguely remembered idea from Martin Buber[1] that speaking to others as thou is a fundamentally different experience than addressing them as it. When we experience others as a thing, as an it, we fail to engage with them as a person. On the other hand, for Buber, the thou is a transcendent experience. I’ll withhold my opinion on transcendence, but he certainly makes a point that applies to modern social media: when we treat people as objects, as accounts, as interests, as posts, we are not actually communicating with them. The it relationship may be quantifiable, commoditizable, and exploitable, but the thou relationship is not.

[1] Buber, Martin, and Walter Kaufmann. I and Thou. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.

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