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Because you need to have a life to get social networking sites.
I don't mean to be harsh, and I'm not looking to get modded a troll, but most
people who enjoy using social sites over the long-term (in my opinion) have a
lot of friends they actually care to keep in contact with. I'm a big Facebook
user. It helps me keep up with my two sisters away at college as well as a lot
of old friends of mine from high school and from college that I actually care
to keep up with.
This is very different from internet-based relationships. (And that's where
"have a life" may be harsh.) If you're into EVE Online or whatever, that's
great. But your relationship with those people is, fundamentally, based in a
digital medium. Sometimes MMO players get together in real life, sometimes
really tight messageboard communities do the same thing. But that's the
exception rather than the norm. The norm is for users brought together by a
common interest to have little interest in maintaining relationships with those
people in the absence of the common interest.
I played Planetside for a while. Not really an MMORPG, but certainly an MMO
back in its day. I had an outfit (Guild, if you will) and several people that I
considered friends in my Planetside world. Not only were they in my outfit, but
we worked well together, laughed at each others jokes, and generally enjoyed
playing together. That was the extent of it, however. I'm not saying I would
not have cared to know how their day was outside of Planetside, or how their
relationship was going. I may have cared, but that would have been a different
kind of relationship. It would have been, for lack of a less-harsh term, caring
about their real life and not just the game life.
American culture is more mobile than ever. It's normal go to high school in one
city, go to college in another city, and get a job in a third city. And even if
you don't move around that much, some of your friends certainly will. It's
precisely these 18 - 25 year olds who use these sites. They are trying to find
a kind of stability in their ever-changing world. If your entire circle of
friends is cycled at least every 4 years, you may want to find a way to combat
that social churn and get a more stable set of friends. A sense of permenance
and community.
As far as the original question about portability goes, I don't think it's that
much of an issue. I chose Facebook precisely because it's not MySpace. I have
no desire to be a part of the MySpace community, or any other community. If I
do want to join another community, then I think re-entering my data would be a
minimal issue. Some data portability would be nice, but hardly required. And in
any case, functional data portability (e.g. not just my personal stats, but my
friends) is really difficult without creating semi-official digital selves or
using a lot of personally-identifiable data. Either of these options result in
serious privacy concerns, so I'll trade a little re-keying for a new social
cite to keep my data relatively anonymous.