I've just been reminded of the internet as it once was. It was primitive and lawless for the most part. It was fun, but there was no guidebook to help you navigate your way around in the beginning. You just sort of stumbled upon websites and communities and found your home somewhere. There was always a lot of bullshit out there, but back then it was a little more obvious because the websites were hokey. Now you can find the same bullshit, but the websites it's found on are slick and professional looking. How's that for progress? We're living in the future.
Seriously though, I remember a time when phones were rotary dial and none of them left their place on the counter-top. Sometimes I wax nostalgic for those times because I didn't feel like I had to be reachable at all times, just in case. In a way I think mobile phones have made us paranoid like that. On the other hand, once they got cameras and could record video and post it to the internet we started seeing a lot of things in ways we'd never seen them before. Abuses that were going on all this time, but now people can catch them in the act and share them. It's been causing no end of trouble for catching things like police brutality and racist tirades in public. You could say that they serve a purpose if they keep us honest, or show us things that had been going on outside of our awareness until now. Technology is very much a double-edged sword and it's interesting to see how communication technology in particular is being weaponized to make us vote a certain way or feel a certain way or believe certain things. It can be used to police our behavior, as in cases where employers monitor the social media activity of their employees to see what they're doing on their own time. Privacy has become a much bigger issue than it used to be.
Things have gone in directions I can honestly say I didn't see coming. I'm not sure how much I like it, at least the way it's become professional and commercialized. In the beginning it seems like there were more original ideas for websites and just general random content. It was an interesting place because you had all of these weird and wonderful hobby websites where somebody was sharing their obsessions with the world, or where people talked about the things they were into with people from across the globe. We were beginning to connect with one another and make friends all over.
Maybe this is what made me flee the book of Face. Perhaps to provide some contrast to illustrate what I mean, I would compare FB with G+. FB was all people you already knew in real life: people you worked with, your mother and your uncles and grandparents and cousins, etc. Not necessarily people you want to let it all hang out with, and you're probably not going to hear much of anything unexpected or educational. G+ had people finding each other by interests, and it was people you didn't already know. It was people from all over the world who got together and had deep conversations with strangers about everything you could imagine. G+ was much closer to what I would imagine a good social media platform to be than FB ever was. Or perhaps G+ simply worked better for people who were curious about the world and the other people in it. FB is for people who are only curious about the people they already know. Plus I felt that FB was already on shaky ground because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and various other abuses of privacy and personal information. It felt too much like it was being used as a means to emotionally manipulate people and tell them how they should feel about things and what they should think. I was seeing people getting sucked in and changing into people I didn't recognize anymore. It felt like a barrage of emotional triggers and political messaging and emotional blackmail tactics. I just didn't feel like it anymore.
And so here I am, hopefully in a quiet corner talking mostly to myself, and I'm fine with that. The signal to noise ratio out there was beginning to get to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment