I read this article about the changes being made to Facebook to make it more like Google+ and Diaspora and this line in it made me realize something that has been bothering me for months.
“To me, this confirms what I’ve been feeling for some time: the big social networking experiment many of us have been taking part in is now entering a new phase. It’s been fun making new friends online or at least pretending to, but now it’s time to return to reality and the people who really matter in our lives. One can hope, anyway.”
For months now, apart from my few personal connections online that I cherish, I’ve felt completely isolated from the Internet at large. And it’s a feeling that had been building for years prior to that. I still use it. It’s still a tool I wouldn’t do without. But there’s much less joy in it for me personally. I feel more disjointed, more distant from people generally. The idea of meeting someone new online seems a long shot to a near impossibility in most of the communities in which I hang out. And I find myself more and more uncomfortable with what I do online. I find myself more guarded. I watch what I say. I watch who I say it to. I’m careful about where I go. I’m careful about who I connect with. And it’s been getting WORSE not better. With each new cool tool that the tech world foists on us the more isolated I feel the experience of the internet becomes. Twitter seems awesome at first, until you realize all it is is a news stream and there’s no meaningful interaction except between pre-existing peer groups. Facebook seems awesome at first until you realize you’re bound by these “real life” connections online as much as you were in the real world. They are all like that. They are getting MORE like that.
And I HATE it.
I don’t want to get to an internet where”making new friends online or at least pretending to” is a thing of the past. I LIKE making new friends online. Heck, I like PRETENDING to make new friends online. Seems to me that every real friendship starts as a “pretend” friendship in some way. I don’t want an internet where you are afraid to interact with anyone for fear of the consequences to your “real life” experiences. I don’t want an internet where every interaction is in a sense informed by things that are built into the system from the get go that you have no or only partial control over. What you look like. Who your friends are. Who your family members are. Your socio-economic status. Your age. Your gender. Your race. Your education level. Your credit rating. Your career. Your job. Even your name. Each of these feels like another set of chains around you restricting what you should say to who and when you should say it.
To me the anonymity of the internet and the lack of obvious connections between people was not a bug that needed to be stamped out. I think it was the internet’s greatest feature. I think blogging was great BECAUSE it was semi-anonymous. It was just you and the person’s writing. Forums were great because you were interacting on an equal anonymous playing field. Yeah the result was sometimes rudeness and trolling. But to me that was a small price to pay for the chance to learn about someone in an environment that is casual and comfortable and devoid of all the baggage that comes with most IRL interactions. People felt free to share things about their lives with strangers they wouldn’t otherwise have ever shared and because of that we were able to build real meaningful relationships from scratch and find acceptance and develop mutual understandings with like minded people we had little or no chance of ever finding or meeting or getting to know in the real world. That’s the stuff from which real friendships are formed. The old internet made that easy.
I am an extreme introvert. The more complex interactions get the more exhausting I find them and the more I withdraw to simplify my life. I think in the old days the internet was a place that just made perfect natural sense for introverts. It was a place we felt at home in. It was a place that made sense to us. And it was a place where we could relate with one another and grow and make lasting friendships.
This new social web is something different entirely. This is the internet created and designed for extroverts. It’s an internet for people who thrive on their social connections IRL and WANT to map them over into their online lives in a 1-to-1 correspondence so that there are no lines between them. Then they can share and share and share with those people through ten million services, broadcast their likes, their activities, their LOCATION even. So the whole internet becomes like a big social party that everybody’s invited to. And that’s just great for advertisers, because once they know where the party’s at it’s trivial for them to hang an unobtrusive budweiser poster in the background or better yet, give away budweiser t-shirts so you can do the advertising for them.
But I was never comfortable at parties and I got no interest in the new digital ones. If the internet isn’t a place to make real lasting connections with new people I don’t know or to strengthen and make more meaningful connections between people that I do know, then I got no interest in this internet. If their internet isn’t a place where I feel more comfortable interacting than I do in the real world then why should I bother with it? I’ll still use it, but it’ll be the way I use a textbook or music CD or a television. It’s this dry dead thing I go to to absorb information. Read-Only. But it’s not a place I want to hang out in and it’s less and less a place I want to contribute to. I don’t feel comfortable getting up in front of a crowd giving a speech in the physical world. Why would I feel comfortable broadcasting myself online?
This new social web we are building isn’t social at all for me. It’s less social. It’s boring and uneventful. It’s just a lot of background noise about nothing. I’d rather go in a corner and read a book. But maybe that just means that I’m just too anti-social for the social internet? That could be, but it wasn’t always that way and I don’t think it was me that changed. The internet did. And sadly I don’t think it’s going to change back any time soon.
Guess all I can do now is go and join Anonymous or something.
