Obasanjo’s Internet – Adetoun Samiat Alamutu

Did you know that there are approximately 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide? Can you imagine all the different ways in which we all use the internet? Obasanjo’s Internet is our interview series where we speak to some of our internet favourites on how they relate to the internet and what it means to them and their work. This week, Adetoun Samiat Alamutu , Head of Story at Culture Custodian,  talks to us about how she uses Obasanjo’s Internet.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Besides praying, I reach for my phone and check my mail. Then, if I have anything pressing to attend to, I try to attend to it first before going to my social media apps like Twitter. I’m always on Twitter, so after my emails, I open Twitter or TikTok first.

How do you use the internet for work or pleasure?

I mean, it’s a mix of both because I work in the digital space. That means I have to be plugged in. So, as I’m scrolling for the endorphins and the dopamine hit, I’m also ideating work ideas. I’m getting news information for my team, getting ideas on things that people are talking about because my work revolves around what is happening and how fast we can get on the things happening in the country.

Say, for example, you have to be very plugged in to be able to explain incidents like the sexual assault or harassment case in UNILAG. I found out from the internet, and I wouldn’t have known about it if I wasn’t chronically on the internet.  We did an explainer on it, and that piece put things in context for so many people. 

What moment or episode in your life would you say captured the essence of the internet?

I’ll say the 2021 COVID era was the first time I really spent time on the internet in a way that translated to being seen. I was on one project or another, so it meant that I was on the internet to research things for Project A or Project B. It also culminated in me working with, I Like Girls. I was always on Spaces. If we had Spaces to host for I Like Girls, I’d be on Spaces.

After COVID, you’d think that everybody would get tired of being on social media. The COVID period just expanded it for me. I was on Instagram, Twitter, I don’t really use Facebook, but I was on Facebook, and I was also on LinkedIn. I was on social media a lot. Post-COVID, I was working in different ways on social media. So if there’s an episode, I can’t narrow it down to one particular episode.

How have you been able to consume a lot of social media and remain sane? How do you balance it?

It’s very important to remember that half of the things we see on social media are not real. It’s uber curated. Social media is like watching a drama. Even when people come to just yarn dust on social media, you need to remember that they are performing. Who is their audience? What are they performing for? Once you realize that, you’re able to consume social media content for what it’s supposed to be. 

So, to remain sane, there’s this famous saying: touch grass. I touch grass a lot. I take my time to interrogate, investigate, or read up on ideas that I see people touting on social media. I go off social media to learn more about them, to see why it’s interesting or not, why it’s something people should do. I try to take my real life experiences for what they are because once you turn off your phone, there’s no social media or anything. There’s no relevance, there’s nothing. 

While people have come to learn so much on social media, like how to navigate the world, how to interact with other people, I also believe that it’s not the only place that people can learn these things from. So touch grass more than being on social media.

Your favourite social media platform and why?

My favorite social media platform has to be Twitter. Other than the fact that Twitter lets me just be a yapper. For many people, yapping means different things. For some people, it means that they set cameras and just talk or they record podcasts, right? The kind of yapper I am is the kind that thinks a lot and is always in their head. 

So these thoughts in my head have nowhere else to go — they have places to go, but Twitter is the easiest place for me to dump them. I don’t need to edit, refine, or reference anything.  I don’t need my points to be solid points. I just pickup  my phone and type the first thing that comes to my mind relating to a topic or whatever opinion I feel like typing, controversial or not. It’s an avenue for me to just remain in my head and share the things in my head with people. So, yeah. I also like TikTok, but it’s not my favorite. I like TikTok because it doesn’t require so much of me. I don’t have to like anybody’s content, I don’t have to repost, I just need to swipe endlessly. It’s rather detrimental to my attention span, but my favorite remains Twitter, followed closely by TikTok.

What was the last meme you saved?

Do you remember the first time something you posted went viral? What was it? How did it make you feel?

I think it was 2018 or 2019-ish, Santorini was getting a lot of PR. Oh my God. Every travel blogger was posting about Santorini. I mean, I love Greece. It’s one of my favorite places, but I don’t like Santorini. There are other islands in Greece that I felt should be getting the PR Santorini was getting. Anyways, some page, I think one of these pages that curate Pinterest stuff, posted about Santorini. That was like the 7th tweet I saw that day, so I was like, “Oh my God, we have heard you, but we don’t have money.” I think that was it. It got almost 3K sweets, and I was like, what?

I didn’t say anything funny. Like, I didn’t understand why people were reacting like that. I was just saying what was in my head. 

What’s the most outrage you have ever generated over something you posted? How did you react to it?

The one I can remember correctly was I think in 2021 or 2022-ish. I can’t remember what year it was. I think we still had the 140 characters limit on Twitter then. 

I was like people should reduce how much they abbreviate, but I was running out of space to write out the whole Tweet. For context, I read English, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. So how language works in the brain, how English functions in society, and all of those things are very interesting to me. I was trying to explain that for people to reduce their abbreviations but there was no space, so I then had to abbreviate.

Oh my God, the lash was insane. So many were like “stupid hypocrite, talk down on abbreviations, then proceed to use abbreviations.” I was like, “God, OK, I don’t care. I can’t explain myself to you people, but like, you can see that there’s no space in my tweet anymore.” But I got the point of that. I really did get the point of that.

What rules do you live by on the internet?

Not to sound harsh, but people on social media are not real people, so I always have that at the back of my mind. When I see people tweet or engage in certain behaviours, I know that half the time, everything is performative. Everybody’s performing for an audience. When you see someone tweeting a rage bait, you know that they’re performing for an audience. So the rule I try to live by is simple. 

Half of these people are stupid, and they can’t say the things that they tweet offline. Why are you engaging with them when you can just call them stupid? I swear to God. That’s my most important rule. 

What is your guiltiest online pleasure?

It’s actually TikTok. Watching video recipes on TikTok makes me so happy. I would abandon work and have deadlines breathing down my neck. The world could be burning, but I would watch a TikTok about food. I think it’s one of the ways I destress. I get agitated really quickly because the way I interact with my work is that I like to produce quick results.

So once I hit a lurch or I’m just confused or at my wits’ end, the first app I open is TikTok. I don’t even play it with the sound on. Just looking at people put food together and producing that quick result is so calming, and I really enjoy doing that.

Would you say you have an online persona?

Yes, but the thing is, my online persona and my actual personality are not very different. I’ve created a timeline where people think that I’m this fun troublemaker — I’m not a troublemaker who goes out of their way to fight or anything — just this very sharp-witted, funny person who is also trouble, but in a fun way. I identify as that. 

Where it deviates from my real personality is that I can say some of the things I tweet to anybody depending on my mood, but I’m just more reserved in person. On Twitter, all hell can be let loose.

What’s your favourite emoji and why?

To continue my troublemaker persona, I don’t have one favorite emoji, but I think I like that upside-down smile because it’s passive-aggressive. I use it when someone is saying something that I don’t agree with or I’m raising my brow at, but I don’t want to engage further.

I use it when I’m trying to lessen the bite in something that I’ve said. I mean, you can’t see that I’m upset or anything, but like, it’s just the right amount of passive aggressiveness in it.

Are you particular about your feed?

No, I just wake up and post what I feel like. I used to be, but at the end of the day I’m not an artist in that sense. Nobody is going to judge my feed for its artistic value. People either want to see my pictures or want to hear what I’m saying.

YouTube or TikTok? Which do you prefer and why?

YouTube, and that’s because it’s a knowledge bank. If you’re looking to learn about something and can’t find resources on YouTube, it’s going to be harder to understand in layman terms, because YouTube creators have a way of breaking down complex concepts into everyday language.

I go there for a breakdown of complex terms and to look at long-form videos. I think one of my favorite philosophy accounts, The School of Life, is on YouTube. So I got to learn deep stuff and all of that.

But TikTok is just like I’m taking crack. It’s just a quick fix. 

Which Nigerian creator do you think the world needs to see and hear more of?

I don’t have a particular creator, but I think that one of the creators I currently find fascinating is Demi of My Friend’s House.

I like what she’s doing. She is not a chef; she just enjoys food and goes out of her way to make elevated experiences out of every eating encounter. I really enjoy her content because in the climate that we are currently in, it’s very easy to give in to despair. It’s very easy to be hopeless and hyper fixate on food costs to the point where you’re not able to enjoy your food experience.

You want to order food at your favorite restaurant, and you see that the price has gone up. She takes all of that out of it and just is able to bring people together to eat and enjoy each other’s company.

Who is the coolest person you follow and the coolest person who follows you?

I follow a lot of cool people because of my work, but right now, I think the coolest person is my friend Bayo Jolaoso – and I’m not even trying to rank as, oh, “the coolest person that I know,” cause I know so many cool people.

He is a fashion photographer and we’ve been friends since uni. He has always been cool, and that’s the thing about cool people. It evolves. It’s not a one dimensional kind of cool. He’s a fashion photographer now, but he was a photographer in school. He used to take really nice pictures. I used to be fascinated by his attention to detail cause I would try to take pictures with my phone and sometimes I would be using phones that supposedly had better cameras than his, but it would never come out the same. Like, how are you doing it and how are you able to put these weird things together and create a nice picture? 

He’s just had an exhibition that I really liked,  As We Are & a Little Bit More. He also has a photo book coming out soon, Eclectic, and it’s a combination of behind-the-scenes photos of Fashion Week from, I think, 2018 to 2024. It’s this gigantic book of really good pictures.

What about the one who follows you?

I don’t know who the coolest person who follows me is. People just follow me. So I just say my friend, Bayo Jolaoso. 

What is your favourite Nigerian podcast?

I’ll say that my favorite Nigerian podcast right now is Uncultured. And it’s not just because I occasionally work on it, it’s what it represents. It’s history in a way that is different. It’s well produced, and has the potential to be the number one culture history podcast in Nigeria.

I don’t think there’s any other podcast that is looking at cultural stuff the way Uncultured is.

Have you ever hooked up with someone you met online?

I have linked up with so many people I’ve met online but my stranger danger radar is on overdrive. Once I see that I’m building some weird or interesting rapport with someone, I kill that rapport and keep it online

I’ve met really great friends online, but hooked up with someone I met online? I don’t want to end up inside a polybag, please. 

5 people you’d love to see answer these questions

Habib Wasulu, Bayo Jolaoso, Mayowa Idowu, Ozzy Etomi, Remi Martins.