This snippet from my draft posts from mid 2010 still rings true. I did not get around to writing much more, but as I reflect on it in 2022, I think about the societal fragmentation we are experiencing in the US and one can’t avoid thinking about the role of social media in that fragmentation…
“The cohesion or sociality that hold an online group together are far less explicit than I recall even a decade ago (Yahoo groups, or prior to that, online bulletin boards, the Well (I never joined)). The enabling structure of engagement is no longer the group or network. Instead, it’s a tweet, or a single picture.”
Nancy
Yes, spot on!
So much technological «innovation» channels. More and more and more. Always another one… but we discovered that ours days still had 24 hours.
It seems to me that the allure to join one more was bigger than the need to figure out that all those channels, beside fragmenting us and our groups of friends, where also taking away our (precious) time to listen to people, instead of devoting more time to learn the technology.
We needed some channels for «gathering online» , but what we have is hysterical spinning where no one seems to have the time to read and think about it… much less »to be with», they only have time «to be without».
That’s why I started to close my channels, get back to slower technologies like blogging, write less (making less noise) and giving more space for Nature (photos also), and overall slowing down.
That’s why I keep reading the whereabouts of the «old gang» but mainly say nothing. Sometimes because you already said it all 🙂
Yay, blogging, Monica!