One of the reasons I have made an effort to start using Dreamwidth again over the past year was a longing for a simpler time on the internet. But in a way, you can never go home again.
Again, I don't miss computers and internet speeds from ten years ago at all, but ten or fifteen years ago was when I was forming my sense of what being "Online" was. I started being a regular internet user between the ages of eleven and twelve, and it's honestly been a blur since in some ways.
But my sense of being part of an "internet culture" happened during my mid-teens, largely under the influence of an older online friend who lived in a constant self-quarantine, well before these times. He ended up becoming really volatile and emotionally abusive due to inadequate mental healthcare and personal responsibility, so that relationship was regrettably lost for good after about eight to ten years. But he had a pretty powerful impact on how I viewed myself, and he was the reason I bothered giving Doctor Who a chance, even though we differed a lot on it once I became a fan.
And that experience of differentiating myself as a "fan" of Doctor Who rather than a friend of someone who liked Doctor Who also watching it to try and commune with him was a sort of game-changer for me in terms of how I interfaced with the internet. This is actually something that is really coming into focus as I'm writing it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
singedsun wrote a thought provoking post about "following" and followers and the parasocial relationships we develop with people on modern social media. While I would like to respond to that post itself thoughtfully, I wanted to credit it with my own train of thought.
The thing about Dreamwidth is that while you can make the exchange as reciprocal or one-sided as you want, but it's really only as good as the relationships you form in terms of it being anything but a journal that could one day be held against you by the tech-savvy. Modern social media is different.
You aren't the customer of it. You're the product. The fact that it is designed to keep your eyeballs on it for as long as possible, to keep refreshing your timeline or dash over and over when you haven't gone the eff to sleep or doing it reflexively upon waiting or when bored or lonely is a way for those who own those companies to market your eyeballs as their product. And that's why there's the ad-creep and the constant, subtle changes to privacy policy, and the efforts to just barely note when something is a "promoted post" or "ad."
And between becoming aware of how my viewership was being commodified and being kind of mad about it and the fact that the 2017-2018 school year is pretty much a black hole for anything I experienced outside my horrible job, I think I have broken some of the bonds of addiction to the computer and the act of being online itself. It doesn't bother me anymore when I have a device-free day, unless I think I'm worrying someone who's used to my being there out of habit. I try to just let anyone who's used to talking to me know, either before or after, what being MIA was about. And I know I don't have to do that, but really that's the only compulsion yet, and within reason I don't think there's anything wrong with being considerate of others' habits and expectations.
That said, being "Online," (which I keep capitalizing because I think it's like a cultural or mental state of being rather than the way that everyone is perpetually "online" now simply by merit of participating in the mainstream culture) feels different than it used to. I guess it has to do with it being absorbed into the mainstream culture. I no longer have to explain to people what in the world the point of being on the internet is for, the way I did when I was a young nerd, but I have assimilated into the mindless scroll and retweet culture for the most part.
I don't know if there is even any correlation between the way I experience the internet and the fact that I can't remember the last time I was "bored" during this quarantine experience. I see a lot of people having the boredom and available headspace to binge-watch and watch movies and stuff, but the way my emotional engagement with media works, I usually won't watch anything but documentary-type media just to kill time while I eat or anything, due to a perceived "back log" in my brain that I know I have expressed before.
I don't even keep up with any TV shows or anything anymore. It's just that I feel like it has been so long since I had any meaningful output (in a fannish/creative sense) that I am extremely resistant to collecting new input.
And I think it has to do with the fact that I am capable of generating goldfish level interests but not really able to latch onto things to let them become ideas without feeling pulled and tugged by a new one. That's one of the reasons I can't even use this time of being stuck in order to finish fic WIPs and stuff. I know that I don't HAVE to do those things, but I'm just frustrated.
I'm not sure if I made the point I was originally trying to make, but we can reassess later.
Again, I don't miss computers and internet speeds from ten years ago at all, but ten or fifteen years ago was when I was forming my sense of what being "Online" was. I started being a regular internet user between the ages of eleven and twelve, and it's honestly been a blur since in some ways.
But my sense of being part of an "internet culture" happened during my mid-teens, largely under the influence of an older online friend who lived in a constant self-quarantine, well before these times. He ended up becoming really volatile and emotionally abusive due to inadequate mental healthcare and personal responsibility, so that relationship was regrettably lost for good after about eight to ten years. But he had a pretty powerful impact on how I viewed myself, and he was the reason I bothered giving Doctor Who a chance, even though we differed a lot on it once I became a fan.
And that experience of differentiating myself as a "fan" of Doctor Who rather than a friend of someone who liked Doctor Who also watching it to try and commune with him was a sort of game-changer for me in terms of how I interfaced with the internet. This is actually something that is really coming into focus as I'm writing it.
singedsun wrote a thought provoking post about "following" and followers and the parasocial relationships we develop with people on modern social media. While I would like to respond to that post itself thoughtfully, I wanted to credit it with my own train of thought. The thing about Dreamwidth is that while you can make the exchange as reciprocal or one-sided as you want, but it's really only as good as the relationships you form in terms of it being anything but a journal that could one day be held against you by the tech-savvy. Modern social media is different.
You aren't the customer of it. You're the product. The fact that it is designed to keep your eyeballs on it for as long as possible, to keep refreshing your timeline or dash over and over when you haven't gone the eff to sleep or doing it reflexively upon waiting or when bored or lonely is a way for those who own those companies to market your eyeballs as their product. And that's why there's the ad-creep and the constant, subtle changes to privacy policy, and the efforts to just barely note when something is a "promoted post" or "ad."
And between becoming aware of how my viewership was being commodified and being kind of mad about it and the fact that the 2017-2018 school year is pretty much a black hole for anything I experienced outside my horrible job, I think I have broken some of the bonds of addiction to the computer and the act of being online itself. It doesn't bother me anymore when I have a device-free day, unless I think I'm worrying someone who's used to my being there out of habit. I try to just let anyone who's used to talking to me know, either before or after, what being MIA was about. And I know I don't have to do that, but really that's the only compulsion yet, and within reason I don't think there's anything wrong with being considerate of others' habits and expectations.
That said, being "Online," (which I keep capitalizing because I think it's like a cultural or mental state of being rather than the way that everyone is perpetually "online" now simply by merit of participating in the mainstream culture) feels different than it used to. I guess it has to do with it being absorbed into the mainstream culture. I no longer have to explain to people what in the world the point of being on the internet is for, the way I did when I was a young nerd, but I have assimilated into the mindless scroll and retweet culture for the most part.
I don't know if there is even any correlation between the way I experience the internet and the fact that I can't remember the last time I was "bored" during this quarantine experience. I see a lot of people having the boredom and available headspace to binge-watch and watch movies and stuff, but the way my emotional engagement with media works, I usually won't watch anything but documentary-type media just to kill time while I eat or anything, due to a perceived "back log" in my brain that I know I have expressed before.
I don't even keep up with any TV shows or anything anymore. It's just that I feel like it has been so long since I had any meaningful output (in a fannish/creative sense) that I am extremely resistant to collecting new input.
And I think it has to do with the fact that I am capable of generating goldfish level interests but not really able to latch onto things to let them become ideas without feeling pulled and tugged by a new one. That's one of the reasons I can't even use this time of being stuck in order to finish fic WIPs and stuff. I know that I don't HAVE to do those things, but I'm just frustrated.
I'm not sure if I made the point I was originally trying to make, but we can reassess later.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 07:29 am (UTC)From:Facebook (probably multiple such but) where you have the weird random feed and can follow friends' babies and cats or get into arguments with their friends. Also partially filling the Usenet-ish "topic discussion" niche for me, with some groups I'm in.
Twitter. Tumbler. I don't read them much.
RPG.net, where the moderation is overall pretty good, and the discussions clean, but the moderation getting IMO too trigger-happy and draconian and now I'm banned for six months without warning.
Livejournal, where I used to have various friends to chat with, before Facebook, and I know a married couple who met on LJ, but not any more... Dreamwidth, which tries but isn't the same.
Once-frequent chat with friends, on AIM or Hangouts or Yahoo, but AIM's dead and my friends never got replacements, and one Google friend moved to Discord, where I haven't gone, and she sucks at email... simple phone texting has partially replaced chat, but that friend is in Japan so not so much with her.
reddit, which is pretty terrible for multi-day discussion unlike a proper forum board with subscriptions like RPG.net or SJGames, but does fill a lot of "here's interesting stuff and quick discussion" desires, without the "you are the product" of FB or Twitter.
AO3, which doesn't do much in the way of discussions but pipes me interesting things to read that have nothing to do with reality.
The Bujold mailing list, which is still going, and sometimes interesting.
A Slack channel, where a bunch of old alumni hang out.
Youtube, with all sorts of videos that even a reader like me has gotten into.
At the moment reddit is the biggest "refresh" sink for me. I just hit and run Facebook once or twice a day.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 12:29 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 12:40 pm (UTC)From:I find myself just as bored and disenchanted with the internet as you are - maybe it's an inevitable phase for everyone who joined the internets at roughly the same time back then? I went online during the mid-nineties, and now I feel as if I've outgrown it somehow, or as if I never really made the transition to web 2.0.
I've never been on FB, I've deleted my Twitter account, the only social media I still visit is Reddit. There are days when I don't even turn on my computer.
Don't know where that development will lead me, but I hope that over time, it'll result in recovering my creativity. I have stories to write, they just won't come out willingly right now.
online
Date: 2020-04-13 04:34 pm (UTC)From:When I first got online it was MAGICAL. There are other people out there who like the same things I like?! And who are willing to talk to me?! And most of them were also gushing about this magical Internet where people would become your friends based on your thoughts and ideas (the "real" you) and not judge you for what you looked like (because posting pictures of yourself was just not a thing yet). And it never occurred to me that some of these people were full of shit and that my online experience would later include the exact same kinds of petty bullying that went on in school, the only difference being that it was now the self-declared "intelligent" people doing the bullying.
LiveJournal was starting to implode at the same time I was having real-life conflicts with most of the people I knew there. (Never let a LiveJournal friend vouch for someone you're about to live with in real life. In hindsight, I still kick myself for not clarifying "So this person you say you've 'known' for years...?") I pretty much lost that entire friend group in a single summer.
I really like Dreamwidth, but I have not fully recovered from that feeling of having been too trusting in the past. Every now and then I'll try to get back into the habit of posting publicly and then I'll turn around and re-set my entire journal to private in a wave of paranoia. (I think the thing I like most about Dreamwidth is that I have the ability to do that. It's the only reason I've never deleted my account. When the 2AM brain weasels start telling me that I'm stupid and everyone hates me, it's hard to believe otherwise.)
My biggest time waster online is YouTube, but that has simply taken the place of television. I grew up in a house where the TV was just always on from the moment we got home to the moment we went to bed. YouTube actually feels like a better choice because I'm watching content I'm specifically interested in instead of just mindlessly channel surfing like I used to do.
My frustration with the modern Internet is that because there are so many different platforms that have different pros and cons, people can't agree on which is the best one to use so you end up losing touch with people who only post on Instagram or Facebook. Back when I first made Internet friendships, I would use any avenue to talk to people. Weird chat programs that I can't remember the name of. And there was this game that I remember only using as a chat program (like, my friends and I figured out how to talk to each other through the game, but never figured out how to play the game). That sense of desperation meant I was much more willing to go out of my way to maintain a connection. And now I'm just so lazy that I can't be bothered to even check someone's social media posts if they aren't on my Dreamwidth reading list.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-14 09:51 pm (UTC)From:I remember when I first got a smartphone, when I moved to Japan, and how much easier it made everything in a way that even moving there a year earlier would have been a completely different experience.
I stay off social media on Shabbat nowadays, and I've noticed it's broken my own addictive tendencies when it comes to endless scrolling. Now that I go 25 hours letting notifications piling up and not checking them, I don't immediately leap to check when I see another one coming in. I'm still Extremely Online, but I'm definitely more mindful about it than I used to be.