I heard a conversation today that I wish I had heard before I wrote yesterday's post. It was between host Sean Illing and his guest Ian Bogost on “The Gray Area” podcast. The two were talking about Bogost’s recent article in the Atlantic called “The Age of Social Media Is Ending.” There is a lot in their conversation of interest, but what really caught my ear — especially after spending so many paragraphs last night thinking about the loss of community — was the idea of conversational scale and the fact that communities should be confined and not global.
That point continues to resonate with me, even hours after the final credits of that episode streamed through my headphones. The notion that everyone can talk to everyone, all the time, and that everyone can be heard and understood, all the time, is just laughable. And I don’t think that, as we used platforms which chased growth at almost any cost, anyone stopped to ask, “If everyone is speaking, who is listening?”
Communities gather around common interests. For me, I was able to find mine based on soccer and loud, distorted guitars and the love of political representation. Very rarely was I able to find someone with all of those same interests, but the unique aspect of Twitter was that even though not every Tweet from an account you followed was important to you, the person Tweeting them usually was. And you knew that even though you didn’t love the San Francisco Giants, for instance, as much as they cared about each and every at-bat, you had an appreciation for the joy or agony each October brought to them.
As I rethink what it means to have to rebuild the online community I had on Twitter, I am reminded that I already have access to many. There’s the Twitter alumni Slack group, where a common past and a common purpose brought us together to help Tweeps find new jobs and has led us to reconnecting in other ways. I also have my content strategy community, where we gather to share ideas and resources and talk about how we can move our discipline forward in the face of repeatedly explaining what it is we do and why it’s important. And then there are the various text threads with friends about music or soccer or Florida politics. Each of these are communities I rely on. But they’re all discrete. With Twitter, I had access to many in these communities at a moment’s notice, all in one place. I guess it’s the immediacy that I miss. But, as Bogost pointed out in “The Gray Area,” maybe some friction is good. Hell, if there was a little more friction to getting these words online, you might not even be reading them. And I’ve yet to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.
Switch Opens
01 December 2022
Crying for more.
I heard a conversation today that I wish I had heard before I wrote yesterday's post. It was between host Sean Illing and his guest Ian Bogost on “The Gray Area” podcast. The two were talking about Bogost’s recent article in the Atlantic called “The Age of Social Media Is Ending.” There is a lot in their conversation of interest, but what really caught my ear — especially after spending so many paragraphs last night thinking about the loss of community — was the idea of conversational scale and the fact that communities should be confined and not global.
That point continues to resonate with me, even hours after the final credits of that episode streamed through my headphones. The notion that everyone can talk to everyone, all the time, and that everyone can be heard and understood, all the time, is just laughable. And I don’t think that, as we used platforms which chased growth at almost any cost, anyone stopped to ask, “If everyone is speaking, who is listening?”
Communities gather around common interests. For me, I was able to find mine based on soccer and loud, distorted guitars and the love of political representation. Very rarely was I able to find someone with all of those same interests, but the unique aspect of Twitter was that even though not every Tweet from an account you followed was important to you, the person Tweeting them usually was. And you knew that even though you didn’t love the San Francisco Giants, for instance, as much as they cared about each and every at-bat, you had an appreciation for the joy or agony each October brought to them.
As I rethink what it means to have to rebuild the online community I had on Twitter, I am reminded that I already have access to many. There’s the Twitter alumni Slack group, where a common past and a common purpose brought us together to help Tweeps find new jobs and has led us to reconnecting in other ways. I also have my content strategy community, where we gather to share ideas and resources and talk about how we can move our discipline forward in the face of repeatedly explaining what it is we do and why it’s important. And then there are the various text threads with friends about music or soccer or Florida politics. Each of these are communities I rely on. But they’re all discrete. With Twitter, I had access to many in these communities at a moment’s notice, all in one place. I guess it’s the immediacy that I miss. But, as Bogost pointed out in “The Gray Area,” maybe some friction is good. Hell, if there was a little more friction to getting these words online, you might not even be reading them. And I’ve yet to decide whether that’s a good thing or not.
See you tomorrow?