Similar Posts
Social media, loneliness and isolation.
“The pathology of social media is all about loneliness”
Social media professionals take the weekend off. Twitter users use hashtags so that their content can be found without being followed. Everything is turned towards discoverability rather than commitment and conversation.
Social media practitioners know that people aren’t listening attentively so they repeat and repeat in the hope of a click or two. Hashtags are just a way of pretending that a conversation has had an audience. It doesn’t measure the number of comments and responses. It doesn’t measure how long threads lasted before they stopped.
There was a time when people like me would read every tweet from people we followed and we would converse daily. It created a lot of friendships and led to a lot of face to face meetings.
In today’s social media landscape I do see loneliness rather than socialising. I see on twitter that people are actively posting only once or twice a day. On Facebook I have seen such a serious decline in participation that there is little reason to stick around. My generation were active in social media for a short amount of time and now they have retreated to “normal” life.
Whilst some people have hundreds of likes on their instagram images I have half a dozen to a dozen. Almost every like on Instagram is a person that I have conversed with online for years. There is a chance that I can tell you how long we’ve been chatting online, whether we’ve met in person and at what event and which networks we have shared. Twitter friends were trusted enough to become facebook friends. Facebook and twitter friends followed on instagram etc.
Facebook was a very active and social place when we were all at university and having the same social life. Twitter was a very social network when I was looking for work and meeting the London Social Media crowd, the French social media crowd and the Swiss social media individuals.
Ingress has presented me with a large group of Swiss people whom I have met many times recently as an active player of Ingress. Many of them are around my age. Â We use Google hangouts to talk and plan missions and are in constant communication.
Glocals was good for finding people to explore new activities and locations with but the connection lasted only as long as the activities. There was little to no follow up socialising online. The Glocals Scuba diving group is the one I got along with best and the group with which I did the most activities. It’s a shame that this was an activity for people a decade older than me.
When I think of the social journey both online and offline I see that loneliness is not the pathology of social media. I joined Twitter because I love to try new things. Facebook was a network of university friends whom I saw every day. Seesmic was a network of people whom I developed strong friendships with that last to this day and Glocals was probably the only network I joined out of solitude and a need to do things on weekends. I like the irony that the network I joined to avoid solitude is the one that resulted in the deepest feeling of it. Eventually every social network becomes lonely but we would say the same about the city from which our friends have gone, of the bars and more.
Geneva is referred to as an airport hub. People come to the city for a year or two and then leave. As a result the refreshing of friendships is very high and it takes a certain personality to cope. Modern transportation; planes, cars, and trains create a pathology of loneliness and social media are part of the solution for as long as the social networks are frequented.
Black Mirror – A television series
Black Mirror – a television series
Black Mirror is a television series that was broadcast by Channel 4 a few years ago and made available to Netflix audiences recently. The series explores a variety of topics and issues to do with technology from death to crime and existentialism. It also explores themes like family and friendship.
We spend a lot of time thinking about technology and how it has changed our lives. Sometimes it’s fun to watch 80s series to see the world as it was before computers and the internet and sometimes it is fun to watch dystopian essays or short stories exploring facets of modern life.
In modern society we see that social media is affecting the discourse that is taking place between politicians and normal people. We see how social media and the lowering of the barriers of entry to the fourth estate have created a golden age for propaganda and disinformation. We see in The Waldo Moment that a CGI bear can mock the political system. It could be directly related to what we have seen happen recently.
Be Right Back deals with online identity and how a person can be emulated once they have died. The question is an interesting one. The more active we are on social media the more our character and personality can be understood and reflected back. This is limited. We are not entirely ourselves online. There are some things that we hide from the online world.
In Fifteen Million Merits we see a dystopian vision of the world where everyone lives in a small dark room. They get out of this room to go and peddle for a few hours to get Merits. Once they have 15 million merits they can “apply” for a different kind of job via a talent show.
Nosedive explores popularity and social networks. Everyone is constantly being rated based on what they share, how they interact with others and more. In such a dystopia people can progress or lose privileges based on reputation. In such a reality people are vulnerable.
A vertovian theme is explored in “The Entire history of You”. An implant called the Grain records your entire life and you have the ability to fast forward and rewind moments of your life. In so doing you can analyse what went well, what went badly and more. You can also see more than you were intended to see through other peoples’ recorded experiences. In this episode we see the Kino-Eye, the all seeing eye. Your life is no longer private.
I like some of the themes that are explored in this series and I recommend people to watch at least some of the episodes. I feel that they are relevant to our discussion about social media and online lives.
Django Django – WOR
from Jim Demuth on Vimeo.
A well told, well edited short documentary about the people who drive the wall of death.
Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things
Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.
I feel that way about watches at the moment. For plenty of people watches are like televisions. “I haven’t owned either for decades, my laptop and ipad are enough.” For years I was without a watch, and without a TV. As a student I never felt the need. It’s only because people had spare televisions that I ended up with one. I never bought one for myself.
Since I bought myself one or more raspberry pies I have been experimenting with various instances, to see how to set them up quickly, and experiment with implementation and more. In the process I am learning skills that I had not experimented with in years. One of these is to flash a USB key with a version of Linux and rebooting a PC from the USB key to run linux. It worked so well that now I am fighting the desire to install Linux over Windows and have the windows machine become a Linux machine.
Watches
Suunto, Casio, Apple and Garmin make watches, and each one tries to quantify the wearer, so it feels as though the wearer must wear all three or four brands to get complete data for all four platforms. but to do this makes us eccentric. The simplest workaround is to track with one device, and manually update all the others.
Whether you wear a Casio, Garmin, Apple Watch or Suunto is also about something else. User Interface. The Garmin Instinct and Casio g-shock watches look tough/solid, while the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak 5 look more fragile, more elegant. The other difference is that the Garmin watch is solar powered and can last for weeks in summer, whereas the Apple Watch and Suunto Peak five can last for a day, or several. The Garmin watches can last for years, by default, because they use mobile phones to do the hard work. They just count steps and time.
Personal Technical Debt
I like the idea of Personal Technical Debt. The concept exists for IT and programming. Writing code is one thing, but updating it later on is a challenge. To give a simple example, if you write a static website by hand then every page that navigates to other pages, needs to updated every time a new page is added. If you use Hugo or another static website generator you see this with every build. My blog is both on wordpress, and as a static site. As a wordpress blog it’s slow and clunky to update because of all the bloat wordpress has added over the two and a half decades that it has been around.
In contrast with Hugo you write you page in markdown, add the categories and tags, run “hugo” and fifteen seconds later the site is ready to publish via GIT FTP. I spent months updating my static site to PHP before being sidetracked by Hugo and blogging.
The New Machine Routine
A while ago if you started to use a new machine you would need to log into all your sites, across several browsers. When I did this once or twice a year it felt slow and uncomfortable. Now that I slide between web browsers fluidly the time it takes to be up and running in Chrome, Firefox or other, is a few minutes. This is because my personal technical debt is low, and because it has become routine to slide between browsers, whether different versions of Chrome, Firefox or other.
With the Raspberry Pi Imager app you can instantiate a new server on an SD card within minutes, and it will be ready for you to log in via SSH whilst connecting to wifi with no user intervention. This is great because you can setup a headless system in a location with no monitor or keyboard.
Devops
When I started following courses on JavaScript, Ruby, Ruby On Rails and more I would get instructions on how to setup an environment and I wasn’t familiar with the process so I had to follow the instructions attentively. By trial and error, as well as repetition the process became relaxed.
I find that, as I become more comfortable with doing things from the command line, I find docker walk throughs more frustrating than helpful. This is because I want to get instructions on how to setup the environment fully, without the overhead of docker running in the background. On a 2016 mac book pro docker slows down the computer.
And Finally
When we do something two or three times we need to follow the instructions when we get stuck. If we set the time on a casio watch several times then it becomes habit. If we implement Linux instances on SD cards and experiment until we break things, then we know how to do things, without breaking them, in a production environment. If we change web browser once every few months or years it can take a while. If we do it several times a month it becomes second nature. That’s what experimenting is about.
Last time I went to the cinema my name was in the credits
Last time I went to the cinema I was in Paris and my name was in the credits. This time I was at the 20th Century Fox offices on Soho Square in London as a guest, along with Loudmouthman, Suzymiller, Danacea, Rupert Howe, Sizemore and many other social media participants.
We were invited to preview the film Juno, which will be out in British cinemas around the 8th of February 2008. It’s nice to be two months ahead of the crowd. It’s also nice to be in a private cinema. I enjoyed the leather seats along with the press package and the fact that when you lean back the seat tilts back at the same time.
It was also amusing to see all these faces. It’s a funny thing to be part of the social media mainly because you recognise and feel that people are familiar although you’ve never met them in real life. What makes this particularly appealing is the fact that it’s not someone saying “oh I’ve heard something about you”. They’ve actually looked at, and appreciated your work, or at least we hope so.
I enjoyed the film and so did the rest of the crowd. Frequent laughter could be heard from around the room quite frequently. I did enjoy quite a bit of the dialogue and the story is a nice one although the end is typical of American films.
Aside from the film and the crowds we did get to interview the organisers of the event as well as Danacea of Forbidden planet, Rupert Howe, vlogger and Robert… whose last name eludes me. It’s 1am and I’m tired.
The Twittervox video should be up by tomorrow evening at the latest. More concise information on those interviewed will of course, appear accordingly
La fête des collabos
Here are some images from the party.
I’m still in the process of uploading the images but the pages can be found at