As what seems like a real challenger for Twitter popped up this week with "Threads" spinning off Instagram, which is a part of the Facebook conglomerate, which is . . . heck, I don't want to take the time to try to run all this down . . . oh, and the Discord invitations . . . wait, this sentence is going all over the place, just like . . .
Welcome to social media in the summer of 2023.
Being an online Sherlock Holmes fan is an interesting space, because our core old school fans don't move very quickly. We have our explorers, our champions of online existence, but we also had a head of America's major Sherlockian organization who was practically Amish until a few years ago. We trend older. Facebook is a major thing in Sherlockian spaces. And keeping one's Twitter properly trimmed up worked for a while for keeping the app usable for the most part, if one avoiding the "Trending" column.
One hates to be an "old," but at the same time, if you live long enough, you're going to be nostalgic for something that doesn't exist any more.
It's a little crazy to think of how U.S. Mail was once our only social media, where your followers were folks who read the local Sherlock Holmes society newsletter that you produced and sent out to a hundred or so folks. And the way we connected to those newsletters was by going down the "Sherlockian Periodicals Received" list in The Baker Street Journal every three months to see which ones we didn't get. But it sure was easy to keep track of.
And you didn't hop from USPS to Fedex and hope people signed up for Fedex so they'd get the random letters you send out.
The thing is, you can love the current tech and convenience and our new levels of connectivity and still wish things were like they were back in the day, imagining a sort of steampunk mash-up of both worlds into some happy middle ground. We're probably not going to ever see that. The Baker Street Journal probably isn't going to recommend who to follow on Facebook or Twitter (or Threads) for a while. But who knows?
Generational change is a thing, and Sherlockiana will evolve as all things do. Or fade, as all things eventually do as well. For the very confusing moment, however, we just have a little bit more to figure out.
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