waffle

Let’s talk about social media and communities. You don’t need me to tell you that the Internet in various forms has always been about facilitating communication and bringing kinred spirits together.

Eventually, communities moved from BBSes and newsgroups to forums, email, chats and instant messaging. But at some point, it became “social media”, and forms of media turned into products. And this isn’t just Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, it goes as far back as del.icio.us, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.

The reason I don’t like social media is that it takes two things that are polar opposites and duct tapes them together. Your own utility – to save links, to write text, to move files or materials, to keep notes, to communicate with yourself in the future, to communicate with some other specific people – and the social media outlet’s desire to fulfil its own objectives first.

This is a recipe for tone-deafness at best. But it’s also an explanation of why so many people are so uneasy with social media.

People don’t mean to leave breadcrumbs behind them constantly, embarrassing or not. People don’t usually worry about alerting local thieves when they tweet about going on holiday. People don’t seem to pay heed to what will be kept in terms of words, deeds and photos.

The realists in the audience will say: tough luck, they’ll need to adjust to this new world. (So will I, to a certain degree. If you’re the kind of person who’ll tweet about your new credit card with a picture of it, you’ll probably derp yourself into an earlier grave or worse journey there one way or the other.)

But the problem is that people are just doing what comes naturally to them. In the real world, you don’t accidentally create pseudo-permanent markers of every decision, activity or communication. Telling people close to you that you’re going on vacation is reasonable, but if the only fitting medium is Twitter and you don’t want to be “that person with a locked profile”, you’ll have to start censoring yourself.

When Twitter thinks it’ll improve everyone’s lives by inserting appropriate favorites, I don’t think they’re making that decision primarily for the filthy lucre. They’re doing it, in their minds, to make Twitter a better place to be in. The problem is that no one at Twitter seems to see that nearly everyone else in this equation thinks it’s a worse result — or if they are, they’re not winning any of those arguments.

A thing you were previously in full control over – your timeline – is now not so, and things show up that you don’t know where they came from or how they’re relevant. Fuck “trust in Twitter”, it erodes Twitter’s utility in your life. To say nothing of the aggressive tactics used by Facebook where it’s clear to all that you’re just a pawn in their enormous advertisment marketplace.

So what’s the alternative? Diaspora and App.net haven’t exactly taken over the world, have they? Douglas Adams said that a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. Even if it wasn’t the goal of these things to become cloistered, that’s what they become. They were built to be the anti-something, rather than to solve an existing problem better than the existing alternatives. And they weren’t built slowly and iteratively to bring people in, they were built as the rescue ship to save the best and the brightest. From what, one wonders. Having friends?

People are going to adjust to the vastness of the Internet and implied exposure and it’s going to happen over generations. I’m not saying they won’t. And I’m not saying that “social media” is doing a poor job today in letting people talk to each other. I am saying that there’s a huge gap for solutions and software and ideas that solve problems people actually have today, especially in a way that doesn’t create a new entity in the middle that then has to care about what everyone thinks about it and how it’s relevant, or in a way that creates a standard to avoid those kinds of entities without spending the next two decades in development hell while the world goes on without them.

Social media has come to symbolize, for me, the tyranny of having to appear relevant, visible and clean to everyone else, the inability to define my own boundaries and the uncertainty about what’s going to happen tomorrow to the fundamental structure of this tool that I’m using – all the while someone either makes money off of me or adds to the looming amorphousness trying to stay afloat.

You don’t have to share these fears, but that’s why I’m writing this on hosting space I pay for myself on a domain I own myself. Not because I relish absolute control over every bit. Not because of personal branding. Not because I am a huge nerd (I am a huge nerd because I write these kinds of articles and quote Douglas Adams in them). I do it because it’s the worst alternative, except for all the others.