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A Thought on Social Media

[in response to acdw]

I took a look around gemlog.blue. The gemlogs cover the spectrum from a single post (then nothing) to a log full of daily entries. Nice!

The gemlog by acdw is very fleshed out. It's a pleasure to read. I thought I would chime in to a post of his (linked above).

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.

Context collapse is a danger to posters on social media. (There are some exceptions, even including people with very divergent interests.) Just as acdw says, when you are with different people you kind of *are* different people.

Adding my two cents, I say that avoiding context collapse has its benefits for people on the other side of the equation: the audience. My grandmother is not interested in reactions to an NPM unpublishing debacle and my tech peers are not interested in a recipe for potato rolls. (Again, there are exceptions.)

One of the wonderful things about Gemini pages is that they're very user-centered. You may be reading words that are mine, but you're reading them your way. Large print? Dark mode? Text to speech? Gemini empowers the user to make those choices. Separating contexts empowers readers to make the choice of what they want to read. Maybe you're a celebrity to them and they truly want to read absolutely everything from you. Maybe they're just here for one sort of thing. All of them are accommodated with separate contexts.

I'm heartened by what I have seen in geminispace. There are authors writing both gemlogs and pikkulogs (I don't quite get those yet). Authors' words are separated, but the same community works on feed readers and aggregation tools to bring them together *as the user sees fit*. To me that looks like the best solution.

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4 August 2020 by Sardonyx

Updated 24 August 2020

File under: culture

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