CC Photo by heartbeaz on Flickr
As 2009 draws to a close, I will remember it as the end of my 5-year love affair of giving a crap what my friends are posting on the Internet.
The idea of “social networking” exploded in the second half of this past decade, with MySpace becoming a household name, and everyone and their mother (quite literally) having a Facebook profile. It was extremely appealing: never stay out of touch with all of your friends, because they’re sharing their whole life with you, even if you can’t be there in person. I got caught up in the craze like all of us, but I soon discovered that, to me, at least, full-blown social networking was a passing fad. Perhaps I overestimated just how much I cared about every mundane detail of my friends’ lives. And considering all of the initial skepticism about Twitter, I’m probably not the only one.
Let me tell you my story, and how I came to this conclusion:
Ever since I actually started talking to people I met on deviantART, I too was enthralled by the ability to stay in touch with people I knew and cared about (especially because, in my case, most of my close friends at the time weren’t people I’d met away-from-keyboard). When I came out of my adolescent basement-dwelling phase and got some actual flesh and blood friends, this tendency translated seamlessly. Most of them were on Livejournal, and I subscribed to all of their blogs on my Friends Page; soon enough, I began to start writing posts of my own every once in a while.
It became a daily, or sometimes quad-hourly, ritual to read through my Friends Page — basically a blog which aggregated all of my friends’ posts in reverse chronological order, except there was no way of marking individual posts as “read”, so it was often a difficult experience — and each read-through gave me journal entries of varying length showcasing what was going on in my friends’ lives, what they were thinking about, or whatever ridiculous quiz or meme they’d stumbled upon that day. My journal was about the same, running the gamut from stories about school and work to my thoughts on the latest video games to “bawwww he doesn’t love me so I’m gonna paint my nails black and listen to Fall Out Boy” embarrassments. Writing those and reading my friends’ was one of the things I enjoyed greatly.
When Facebook became popular, I tried to get into it, but never really did. Perhaps it was because it was mostly populated by people from my school, whom I wasn’t extremely close with, and the members of my big dysfunctional family of geeks and furries were all sticking with Teh El Jay. The fact of the matter was that all the people on Facebook just weren’t involved with my life enough that I really cared about the mundane details of their lives.
(As an aside, the time much of my closer friends began to start using Facebook was about the time my mom did too, and no offense mom, but that’s not exactly an encouragement to start posting more of my personal information and thoughts there)
In January 2009, I rebuilt Plankhead.com (before that it was a Google Sites-built abomination that was so horrible, not even The Internet Archive gave a shit about it) as a place to talk about my filmmaking and futile attempts at projecting a professional persona. As I began to blog here, I started to get more heavily involved in blogger culture, and finally got around to making a serious effort at scrounging up a good RSS reading list. Feedly did wonders for me in this regard — it recommended a ton of sources that I’d never have found on my own, no matter how loudly Robert Scoble screams about the 2010 Web, or how egregiously MG Siegler misuses intermediate punctuation in a failed attempt to sound sophisticated. Lo and behold, there was a whole breadth of information about what was actually happening in the world! This was interesting! Stories about what shiny gadgets are coming out next year, articles doing the kind of artistic critique of video games I’d only dreamed of in the past, headlines about important news going on all over the world, and proclamations that we will all be immortals who have sex with robots in the future and how awesome that will be.
To be honest, it started to make hearing about how incredibly uggggh my friends’ midterms were for them a bit less appealing. I still wanted to keep in touch, but in lieu of slogging through the Friends Page every day, I simply went through the convoluted process of adding all of them to my RSS reader. One. By. One. You’d think it would be simple, but Livejournal has really user-unfriendly RSS feeds.
Now, I don’t get the chance to read every single article that shows up in my RSS reader. So, needless to say, some of my friends’ journal entries fell by the wayside. And I didn’t miss a thing. I saw them in person, and not having kept track of every detail of their lives didn’t inhibit our interactions one bit. In fact, dare I say they enhanced them, because we had so many more potential avenues of conversation.
Perhaps this is why I couldn’t get particularly enthralled by Facebook in its early days, before it started to turn into the Twitter-clone-meets-America-Online that it is today. Nice photos of you at a party. Do I care? No. No, not really. I mean no offense, it’s just not that interesting.
Now, if you post a link to that photo with a tiny bit of description attached to it, then maybe I’ll take a look, if the description is interesting. This is why Twitter appeals to me: it’s simple, distilled, and to the point. If I’m not interested in what you have to say or show me, it’s only 140 characters (although would it kill them to give us 200?). In general, instead of an in-depth analysis of what college classes they’d like to take, I would much prefer my friends share with me a link to a great article they found somewhere; it’s probably much more interesting and better written.
It’s funny, just as I finished that paragraph, one of the people I’m following on Twitter just said this:
The irony of including that in this very big long bullshit self-indulgent wall of text is not lost on me, by the way. But if you’ve read this far, you’re at least enjoying it.
Of course, perhaps this isn’t as self-indulgent a big long bullshit wall of text as it may seem, because I don’t think I’m alone in this mentality. Devoting such an extraordinary amount of attention to your friends on the Internet, for me and many people, cheapens the personal relationships you have with them away from the keyboard.
There’s a good reason Facebook wanted to be more like Twitter: it’s so much better, overall, to pay less attention to what’s happening to your friends and more to what they’re looking at and want to show you. The occasional bit of personal reflection or drunken party photo album has its place, but there’s much more to be gained from social web sites and services if your friends become footnotes; when, for example, Bob links you to an article, you’re paying more attention to the article than you are to Bob, but subconsciously you make the connection between the article and Bob. Next time you see him, you and Bob have something new to talk about. Or, of course, you can reply to Bob’s link right then and there, and engage in a text-based conversation about something that’s decidedly not self-centered.
So perhaps the title I gave this big long bullshit wall-of-text is confusing now: how is this “antisocial” networking if it’s just a more socially fulfilling use of social networks? That’s because there’s one more facet to this, and one that may be more unique to me than the other things I’ve rambled about thus far: the most interesting stuff often comes from people you barely know.
Am I friends with Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin? No, but I’m fascinated by what they share with me and the rest of the world. Do Patrick LaForge and I know each other personally? No, but I’m often interested in what he’s looking at, and sometimes he’s likewise interested in what I link to. Oh, and that Astolpho person I quoted up above? I barely have any idea who the hell he is, he’s just someone who followed me one day. In fact, I had to Google him just now to verify that he was a “he” because I didn’t remember offhand. But he says and shares interesting things, so I keep track. I’m sure many people could find joy in a similar situation to mine.
Regardless of whether you’re a seeker of interesting stuff whether you’re personally acquainted with the person sharing it or not, or someone who wants to know what his or her circle of friends thinks is amusing today, the hardcore keep-track-of-all-your-friends-blogs-and-photos-and-rants is not something I see having a wide appeal for much longer, at least outside of shy teenagers with too much time on their hands. Perhaps that’s why all of our moms are getting into Facebook now: socializing on the Internet has grown up.
But I prefer talking in person, thanks.
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