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[in response to Alex Schroeder]
This morning (my time anyway), AS posted an article about "The problem of social media". I agree in the main with all the points made -- I have quit checking Facebook by-and-large (and now they've redesigned their site, I don't even know *how* to check it!), and I really only go on Twitter when I want to feel badly about the state of the world, which isn't often (example: I found out I missed National Mutt Day yesterday, 31 July). I've been trying to quit Reddit for a while now; I use it as a mindless scroll-through when "nothing else is on," but it's got so many bad takes and low-key (and high-key) racism and sexism and everything else that I don't like reading it. It's honestly not good for my mental health.
It feels like none of it is very good for my mental health, honestly. I find myself more and more wanting to engage with people long-form: writing an email, for example, or posting a missive on my gemini space. The short-form writing I like is ephemeral chatting, like IRC or texting or Facebook (yes, FB) Messenger. I've thought about trying to get my friends to switch from FBM, but when I've floated it to my wife it's been met with less than excitement, let's say. But that's another story for another day.
I suppose I should mention why I'm writing this response. It's a particular few paragraphs in AS's post that pinged a thought in my mind:
I think it hurts even more on Facebook because we used to know these people face to face. My current disappointment is my wife reading me the opinions she finds of people that used to be our friends. And… maybe I should geoblock Switzerland from my blog so that my real and imagined friends from the face to face past can’t read my shit opinions.
In offline society we don’t run into this as often. In church, at work, in pottery class, at the play ground – it’s easier to bond with people because you don’t know about their shitty opinions. There’s fear of repercussions, of non-verbal negative feedback.
Maybe that negative blowback is missing, but then again I also understand that some people need safe spaces where to vent their opinions without the blowback they get in real life. Hm. Not sure.
I think what AS is talking about here is a phenomenon known as "context collapse" -- in real life, we're able to be different versions of ourselves to different groups: when I hang out with my DnD friends, I can be different than when I'm at work, which is different than who I am with my family, etc. Online, though, everything we say is tied to our one online identity, especially when Facebook, et al. try to own every aspect of our online lives. I read an article last month that mentioned context collapse in a larger piece about what the author called "content collapse," which I'll mention in a moment. Here's a quote from that article from an earlier article that mentioned context collapse:
The problem is not a lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a black hole sucking all of time and space — virtually all possible contexts —in on itself. The would-be vlogger, now frozen in front of this black hole of contexts, faces a crisis of self-presentation.
from this article on YouTubers,
I think the comments on that roughtype article mentioned Google+, actually, though I can't remember where I read it now. I tried G+ for a little bit but it was, to quote AS, "too complicated, too time consuming," plus no one I actually knew used it. The thing about real life is that we all use it all the time. It's the ultimate platform, if you want to get all VC about it. Maybe we should hold a few fundraising rounds for real life. We can brand it MeatSpace(TM).
Anyway, the article I linked up there was interesting (and I might've written about it before on this capsule) because it also talked about *content* collapse -- where, due to the sameness of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., news articles from reputable sources look the same as clickbait, general whinging from your aunt, actual fake news, conspiracy theories, and cute dog photos. It doesn't help that sometimes news companies run stories with cute dogs, or discussing conspiracy theories, or whatever. But all that stuff is there, in your One Feed, together and nondifferentiated. It makes it really hard to know what to trust.
That's one of the things I like about Gemini, I guess? The stuff on this protocol is apart from the rest of the web, you can't even properly link it in Twitter or what-have-you, you have to go *find* it. So you know where you are. Even though you can't *style* capsules a la CSS, because Gemini encourages long-form, self-contained discussion, people's writing styles shine through pretty well. Plus, we have ASCII art, if we ever get really lost.
I guess I'll end it here. I'm never sure where to end these things; they're just kind of threads of thought wending their way through. I never stop thinking (not a brag (do you ever stop thinking?)), so it's hard to know where to stop a dispatch.
Now that I'm thinking about it --- part of the problem is calling it social *media*. Media has a producer-consumer paradigm: the artist/creator/actor *produces* the media, to be *consumed* later (or live, in the case of news, etc) by the viewer/reader. However, social "media" is -- should be -- inherently *collaborative*. It's a conversation between or among a community of people: cf. comments, re-tweets, boosts, etc. But the big SM companies still try to shoe-horn the concept of media into their platforms, so we get things like Influencers, YouTube celebrities, etc. Traditional media has only been doing what they know -- the producer-consumer model. This is another way in which the Internet requires a paradigm shift that is only just beginning to be understood. I really hope we can, as a species, realize the true power of the collaborative nature of the Internet.