💾 Archived View for inconsistentuniverse.space › gemlog › 2022-01-20-spiders.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 02:54:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm stewing on some old thoughts of mine from thousands of years ago, by which I mean at the start of the pandemic.
Spider webs, the extended body, and social media
It's been on my mind in part because as I've been catching up on gemspace I've seen what one expects on the smol internet: critiques of the commercial web and social media.
e.g. The idea of a social network is kinda broken
And while I don't know if I 100% agree with my past self's analysis I do think there's something to the idea that consuming other people's thoughts and opinions rapid fire on mobile devices hits different than even the very early days of things like Twitter when it was mostly experienced via desktop and much different than the days of reading blogs in the 00s. I never feel like I'm experiencing other people's will being pushed on me in the smol internet, even when I disagree with people!, than I do from seeing the same opinion being said and shared over and over in slightly different ways scrolling through twitter.
I think what I missed in my first post was that scale is a big part of the problem too. Seeing one person, even a handful, of people say something is very different than feeling like you're absorbing some kind of zeitgeist while you're bored sitting in the bathroom.
I guess going back to something else I wrote awhile back
the scale and speed of information flow on the modern centralized web is, I think, deeply unhealthy for us. I don't think millions of people seeing the same opinion, five layers of discourse about the opinion, context stripped versions of that discourse turned into moral shibboleths, and post-ironic memes about *that* all in the course of a day is particularly a good epistemic model for literally anything.
To the pithy and the shareable go the spoils of our attention, which has very little to do with right, wrong, or even self-consistent.