Talking in an empty room

[cjsmith]

Social media:

MeWe: You’re alone in a well-appointed living room. Say something if you like.

Here: You’re alone in an empty, dimly-lit brick and steel warehouse. Occasionally you realize that no wait, there IS someone else here, because if you say something, a voice speaks up to reply. (Thank you, amaebi, for being here.)

Twitter: You're in a room full of televisions and all of them are changing the channel once per second. There are no people in the room.

FB: You’re at one of those street fairs that’s so crowded you can’t move. No matter how loud you shout, no one can hear you.

Do some more? These are the only ones I know.

Edit Instagram, with credit to joedecker: You're alone in a room with mirrors covering all the walls. Boy, are you attractive.

Comments

[batrachian]

Some portions of the warehouse better lit than others.

(Also I'll take the dark and the quiet over a street fair that's sold out. But it's also been obvious for a while that I'm not the target demographic for Social Media)

*muses*

[cjsmith]

Omg me neither. Some people have It, whatever It is, and those people perceive all these spaces as pleasant rooms containing their friends.

I, too, prefer the warehouse to the street fair. Vastly.

[batrachian]

I certainly have friends here, but there is a qualitative difference compared to the folks I know in embodied spaces.

(Not, categorically, better or worse. Just different.)

[cjsmith]

Agreed, embodied space is definitely different for me as well.

[nosrednayduj]

Sometimes I miss mudding. LambdaMOO really was like having real friends. I got together IRL with mudders from distant places when I visited, and hosted mudders who were visiting Boston, that I'd only ever known through the mud. I don't think I would do that with random twitter followees. (There's that word again.)

[cjsmith]

I never mudded, but some usenet was real-friend-ish, as were a couple of mailing lists and some corners of LiveJournal.

[lcohen]

in terms of converting people i first met online into real-life friends, LJ/DW of the past didn't do too badly for me--i would sometimes friend people who i saw posting to the journals of friends who seemed interesting with good luck and then meet them in person, later. whereas i think i have two FB friends who i didn't first meet IRL and THEN friend--both of them foreign shapenote singers. i met a lot of people online through usenet and then IRL. on twitter, i follow a lot of people i don't know and have no intention or desire to meet--mostly people who post about sports/politics/literature in a way i like.

people may not recall this but early on, okcupid had a much stronger "get on here with all your friends and interact with them here" vibe which is how i got onto it in the first place, long before i used it as a dating site. i met and made (platonic) friends with several people there--people i'm still friends with today.

[cjsmith]

I never understood that about OKCupid until it was no longer at all true

[amaebi]

Wow, that's apt.

[cjsmith]

*grin* Thank you! Do you have any you can add? I know only these four (with a huge caveat that I'm seeing Twitter only for a handful of days now, too).

[amaebi]

No, I've only seen this from you.

[lcohen]

i think that the difference for me is that i am focused on what i am trying to do with each entity. LJ/DW really is a record for me of what i do and how i feel. i am happy that there is a bit of discussion still available here, but even if no one ever commented on a single post of mine, ever again, i would still be posting here because i find it an invaluable tool for keeping track of my life.

i'm on twitter but i hardly ever tweet and i only read it every couple of weeks--it's like drinking from a fire hose.

i have your link to MeWe open on my home computer but haven't done anything about it, yet.

i hate the powers that be at FB but it really has put me back in touch with a bunch of people with whom i would not otherwise be in touch. also, it's a useful place to organize things like the gathering that brought me to palo alto in august. so i remain there and i post things on occasion and i wish it were better but it isn't.

[cjsmith]

Sounds like the only one you use for personal connection of any kind is FB. I tried that for a while. I might have to do it again. Acquaintances I had on FB will by and large refuse any other form of connection.

Twitter is insane, to me. It wants to be a fire hose even if you follow only one person. Half the feed is ads and "you should follow _____". The other half is "this person liked ___", "this person follows _____", "this person reposted _____". It really REALLY doesn't want to show you "this person".

[lcohen]

that's not quite true--i read DW for personal connection--i just don't rely on it to keep me posting.

[cjsmith]

Ah, ok, gotcha. :)

[nosrednayduj]

There are some settings to make twitter more like following the person and less like random crap. Obviously it's ad-supported, and they want you to follow more people so they can show you more ads, but mostly I find it shows me what the people I follow tweet. Sometimes I switch settings so I get the random crap because I find it interesting what my followees (is that a word) like. I only follow people who tweet less than 5 times a day. Ish. So I can mostly keep up.

[cjsmith]

What settings are those? The only one I know is “turn off retweets” (per television).

[nosrednayduj]

So I had thought it was by setting Quality Filter on the Notifications setting ("..." to get menu -> Settings -> Notifications -> Quality Filter), but the documentation doesn't seem to agree. Poking around on the internet it seems like there are fewer options than there were earlier, in particular there was once a "Settings->Content Preferences->Show Best Tweets First" that you could disable and it made it go in chronological order and I think also disabled seeing a bunch of the junk, but that setting is no longer present. So, maybe I'm just wrong.

[cjsmith]

Ah. Yeah, someone else was saying there were useful settings and he too looked and they were gone.

[siliconshaman]

DreamWidth: You're in a twisty maze of interconnected living rooms all belonging to different people... but not everyone is at home.

[cjsmith]

Ha! Yeah, there’s that. I suspect most people aren’t at home.

[hitchhiker]

tumblr: you're in a campground where everyone has pitched their own tent and are playing a hundred simultaneous games of consequences

[cjsmith]

...okay? (I suspect I lack the referents needed to build an impression out of this.)

[hitchhiker]

tumblr (as far as i can make out, at least, i'm not on it) has a weird comment format where the way to comment on something is to reshare it to your own blog and add a comment, which makes the whole thing kind of chaotic.

[lcohen]

bleah. that sounds like a nightmare.

[cjsmith]

Don't they all. :(

[zahraa]

Awesome.

[cjsmith]

Feel free to add more! :)