I've been doing social media since long before it was widely called social media. By the time twitter was popular I'd already done a pretty good job of learning from just a response or two who deserves my time and who doesn't.
Honestly, being able to read what people on social media are saying, how they're saying it, how they're responding to you, etc., and more importantly, what they're looking to get, whether consciously or subconsciously, out of the interaction is just a skill like any other.
It can be learned, and I wish in general there was more focus put on that because I think it would have a serious impact on how social media effects us, how it contributes to our social/cultural discourse, and who's able to amass power (of all different kinds) from social media.
It could also have a tremendously positive impact on a lot of people's psychology, being able to learn how to tell when someone is acting in good faith and when they're not, when they're trying to use you and your reactions for selfish things, and so on.
There's always so much talk about how social media is bad for us and has such a negative impact on all kinds of things, but there's never really even much of an idea of presenting a solution, outside of a "get rid of it" approach, which isn't realistic on a wider scale, and in
many cases individual scales. There are ways to minimize some of these negative effects social media can have, things that can help us avoid those negative aspects and focus on the good things social media can do. We just need to recognize that social media interaction can be a
skill, one that can be tremendously valuable, and start to look at it as something that should be taught on a wider scale.
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