![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
on communication/the contimunity:
I can't write this post.
i know where it comes from and where it goes but it goes inside all kinds of other people and the things they said and their locked LJ entries and so on. the process went something like this:
-I took the Technorati annual survey, which I still get emailed every year even though I have been officially a Recovering Ex-Blogger since shortly after the 2008 election. It is full of questions about social platforms I don't use and, in many cases, have not even heard of. I never actually meant to be an internet luddite I swear to god
-mused aloud about whether I should be on site x or site y, but not site z obviously, and even when people say 'yes' the barriers surrounding my comfort zone seem not worth the effort of challenging
-this. Pause [while I contemplate the impenetrable cocoons of my fandom life, which has been so good to me these last few years, in ways that are off the map and way out in the woods and which I never intended to relate here.] Then two other LJ posts from friends, both locked, posted almost simultaneously; the second one I read was about updating my livejournal like it's 2004. The other was about the reasons updating a livejournal had become functionally not possible. Okay so I never felt like updating my LJ ever (I started on Deadjournal and still mirror there from Dreamwidth, and Deadjournal is the only one of the three I pay for an account on), but maybe there's a social-informational bioaccumulating toxicity that prevents one from updating a livejournal beyond a certain randomly-determined terminal point. It's in the social structure it emanates. Or it's in fandom. Or it's in what fandom [potentially] does to gradually poison the water.
[Also,![[deadjournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/dj-userinfo.gif)
cryo, here. I disagree with this in a number of respects but it's a hella interesting post.]
I know it's not fashionable to believe in the ghost in the machine, but in social media you kinda fucking have to. It was intuitive to me the first time anyone (a doctoral student I used to know) explained the concept to me, woven between Gibson and how opening an instant message client feels and her past life as a coder; of fucking course social media is imbued from the code up with its own, often unintended, social universe and social consequences. It is possible that none of these societies are inherently stable.
-I guess I'm not going anywhere new, socialtechwise, because it feels like staying where I am is enough to meet my meagre social needs. I have this history of paring some needs to the bone, not least social ones, because I can. All those times when you move and then settle in someplace else and immediately hook up a wire or a lack thereof and take your world back out of the box you packed it in - same handle or almost, same URL or almost, same people or someone, and that's all the continuity you have and conveniently also all the continuity you need?
[i want to smush the concept into 'contimunity', can this be a word now]
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation wikipedia link because too lazy to paraphrase
-I am at least using skype sometimes now, be it mostly to troll around with Fly? Please hit me up there and see if I can remember how to talk out loud. I am 'thene a'.
-ETA: http://lawandsexuality.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/being-inappropriate.html
unrelated frags;
[-and when I'm any new place I figure it takes time to have a sense of home, no way does it take less than nine months or a year, and it's partly the people and also partly not. It's partly that sense of adventure I am not feeling right now.
-I've always said I don't keep this blog for anyone but myself. I've discovered I also don't keep it for myself, not in the sense of actually valuing its contents; rereads of the long-ago just make me realise that I am an embarrassment to the human race but dear god do I know I needed to write that stuff at the time. My voice changed or I found it; it keeps changing, I keep finding it.
-belated two and two together regarding that one gem of a fic comment i got in 2004 about Dr Seuss and Les Miserables. just, wow.]
i know where it comes from and where it goes but it goes inside all kinds of other people and the things they said and their locked LJ entries and so on. the process went something like this:
-I took the Technorati annual survey, which I still get emailed every year even though I have been officially a Recovering Ex-Blogger since shortly after the 2008 election. It is full of questions about social platforms I don't use and, in many cases, have not even heard of. I never actually meant to be an internet luddite I swear to god
-mused aloud about whether I should be on site x or site y, but not site z obviously, and even when people say 'yes' the barriers surrounding my comfort zone seem not worth the effort of challenging
-this. Pause [while I contemplate the impenetrable cocoons of my fandom life, which has been so good to me these last few years, in ways that are off the map and way out in the woods and which I never intended to relate here.] Then two other LJ posts from friends, both locked, posted almost simultaneously; the second one I read was about updating my livejournal like it's 2004. The other was about the reasons updating a livejournal had become functionally not possible. Okay so I never felt like updating my LJ ever (I started on Deadjournal and still mirror there from Dreamwidth, and Deadjournal is the only one of the three I pay for an account on), but maybe there's a social-informational bioaccumulating toxicity that prevents one from updating a livejournal beyond a certain randomly-determined terminal point. It's in the social structure it emanates. Or it's in fandom. Or it's in what fandom [potentially] does to gradually poison the water.
[Also,
cryo, here. I disagree with this in a number of respects but it's a hella interesting post.]I know it's not fashionable to believe in the ghost in the machine, but in social media you kinda fucking have to. It was intuitive to me the first time anyone (a doctoral student I used to know) explained the concept to me, woven between Gibson and how opening an instant message client feels and her past life as a coder; of fucking course social media is imbued from the code up with its own, often unintended, social universe and social consequences. It is possible that none of these societies are inherently stable.
-I guess I'm not going anywhere new, socialtechwise, because it feels like staying where I am is enough to meet my meagre social needs. I have this history of paring some needs to the bone, not least social ones, because I can. All those times when you move and then settle in someplace else and immediately hook up a wire or a lack thereof and take your world back out of the box you packed it in - same handle or almost, same URL or almost, same people or someone, and that's all the continuity you have and conveniently also all the continuity you need?
[i want to smush the concept into 'contimunity', can this be a word now]
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation wikipedia link because too lazy to paraphrase
-I am at least using skype sometimes now, be it mostly to troll around with Fly? Please hit me up there and see if I can remember how to talk out loud. I am 'thene a'.
-ETA: http://lawandsexuality.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/being-inappropriate.html
unrelated frags;
[-and when I'm any new place I figure it takes time to have a sense of home, no way does it take less than nine months or a year, and it's partly the people and also partly not. It's partly that sense of adventure I am not feeling right now.
-I've always said I don't keep this blog for anyone but myself. I've discovered I also don't keep it for myself, not in the sense of actually valuing its contents; rereads of the long-ago just make me realise that I am an embarrassment to the human race but dear god do I know I needed to write that stuff at the time. My voice changed or I found it; it keeps changing, I keep finding it.
-belated two and two together regarding that one gem of a fic comment i got in 2004 about Dr Seuss and Les Miserables. just, wow.]
No, they're not stable...in fact, I'm surprised LJ has lasted so long.
I have seen many great online communties explode, fade, calcify, or become large and soulless: occasionally they revive or hang on in a lingering half-life with a core of diehards and old friends, but that's the exception rather than the rule.
I say this as someone who's been participating on the internets imtermittently since 1989 and fairly consistently since 1994. I tend to fade from a particular fandom or game community (which is also an online peer group) every four to six years, after which I eventually get active with a different group whose mode, not just shared interest, is different.
So the past five years or so of attrition from FB, Tumblr and Twitter siphoning off writers and changing how we interact doesn't startle me so much. Web 2.0 is still a new thing for me: I started with in-house bbses and primitive email, then had a long stint where we interacted with realtime text on MUs and posted static webpages that didn't change content, and then forums came along, and then journals.
Each of them altered the way we communicated. I don't think the soulless vortex of Facebook is the end of that process, or that the web has permanently devolved to the lowest common denominator of 140 characters.
That said, I still find pockets of DW and LJ that are working for me. But I can see why they wouldn't be sufficient for many.
/rambly response
I didn't use the internet at all until 2000 and didn't have a home connection until 2003, so I still feel like a n00b and am very set in my initial norms, I guess. I caught the shift of gravity from MLs to the Pit and then from the Pit to LJ - and even then, I drifted out of fandom for a few years in the middle so I didn't really get into fandom on LJ until 2009 /late to all the parties. With LJ specifically, there's nothing for me to miss personally? I'm just interested in the way the shift has affected the people I know there, particularly fandom people. Insofar as there's 'sadness', it's all other people's.
I'm barely even remembering to check LJ right now but there's pockets of DW that are delivering hard, and Deadjournal is forever its quiet and stubborn self, encouraging antisocial wangstblogging as something akin to a heritage activity - god knows no one has ever made money off it but the atmosphere is golden. So my situation is mostly 'working' well; I just feel a little isolated. One thing that's come up a lot in conversations about this is that as conversation moves away from LJ to other places, it weakens substantially in some respects, as the next-to-last line of your comment registers; it is good to state that this isn't the end and it's not devolution either because people have lost something tangible, be it faith in the power of an Interests search or an expectation of thoughtful conversation threads that are not presented in three-inch-wide columns such that one ends up reading any conversation with more than five comments vertically one word at a time.
I figure social media is going to be affected by that tendency for out-of-date media to find a stable niche purpose after they've ceased to be dominant. In that sense I'm sure a lot of social media will develop a continuing life. (Dreamwidth seems to be the primary home of panfandom RPs, for example, and I imagine it would be hard for any service to be a better fit with RPers' needs, not even just in terms of features but also in terms of ability to harness RPers for $$$. Unfortunately I really dislike panfandom RPs - I find them more alienating than anything else I've ever tried to do on the internet.)
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And then I read the last line and loled ;)
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Fuck the fashionable coastal waters; head for the pelagic web...
(Anonymous) 2012-12-04 09:48 pm (UTC)(link)Having lost my last community (TV.com) I've made a conscious effort to strike out and build my own "island". I bought three years hosting on ebay for £2 so it's the domain name that is the big cost (try namecheap.com). It's been hard graft, but hopefully I can connect with people who are in it for the long term, and build a lasting community. The biggest problem is finding the time to blog.
Even if you're not up to that, you can cherry pick the fads. Miss out on one band wagon and another will be along in a year or two. You just have to resist the peer pressure.
Oh, and whining about our lives is definitely one of the important uses of a blog - so don't worry about it. I'm prepping a 1000-word whine for tomorrow as Tribunal Day approaches..
Re: Fuck the fashionable coastal waters; head for the pelagic web...