Healthy, Sustainable Social Internet

I read two articles recently that clarified a lot of what I had been thinking about interacting with people online. I have been feeling some nostalgia for early days of the internet, including nostalgia for things like BBSs and IRC for which I wasn't even around. The Fediverse has been offering some improvement — I like my Mastodon account. However, these articles got me thinking about how a social network tool is used, not just which one to use.

Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic (archived copy):

The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

And Ellis Hamburger, a former worker at Snapchat writes in The Verge:

Today, the product evolution of social media apps has led to a point where I’m not sure you can even call them social anymore — at least not in the way we always knew it.

They each seem to have spontaneously discovered that shortform videos from strangers are simply more compelling than the posts and messages from friends that made up traditional social media. Call it the carcinization of social media, an inevitable outcome for feeds built only around engagement and popularity.

I love the reference to “carcinization,” but most important from both articles is the contrast between “networks” and “media,” as Bogost puts it. I've been finding my usage of Instagram in particular to be shifting toward following strangers who I find entertaining instead of interacting with people I know.

I don't have anything against entertaining posts from strangers, but I want somewhere I regularly interact with people as I would if we were socializing in person. I recently finished grad school, and my job as a college lecturer involves a lot of working on my own, which means my days don't have the kind of regular, casual interaction I valued so much in school built into them anymore. I'm very introverted, so “ambient” interactions with people are a lot easier than scheduling more intense, focused interactions as I have to do now. I think the internet has the capacity to provide some of that “ambient” interaction I crave, but now I need to think about how to accomplish this.

How should I find or create these interactions?

One thing that has helped me was that earlier this year I saw someone (I forget who) mention that the Fediverse places a high premium on directly interacting with people, even strangers, and that has emboldened me to join in on conversations, which led to positive interactions.

As I interact with IndieWeb circles more, I want to continue these interactions with fellow IndieWeb bloggers as well — either through sharing, commenting, or using technologies like Webmention, which I recently added to my site. I'm encouraged to do so by commentary from IndieWeb people, such as Tracy Durnell writing that

Building a trail can be an intense, concerted effort, but simply a few people walking in the same line can leave a faint path through the forest (you see this from deer trails). Choosing to walk together is how you can build a shared link with someone new. The more times you walk it together, the deeper you’ll wear your shared track. A new trail doesn’t have to involve explosives and hard manual labor right off the bat. Just walking together is enough to start.

It's nice to be reminded that small, “ambient” interactions have value, not only to me, but to the people around me.

Final Thoughts

That's all for today! I'm still figuring out my thoughts on all this, but I've been inspired by Maggie Appleton's discussion of “digital gardens,” and I'm pushing myself to write even if I'm still working through an idea.