Non-fungible spaces
Apr. 28th, 2022 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinOkay, the whole Twitter/Musk thing seems to be extremely up in the air and (self-reflexively, what) full of sound and fury and who knows what it signifies and how everything will pan out...
But all the people running around going 'move to X or Y' different social media platform -
- sure, I would like to see more people on Dreamwidth! - hello, any new people! -
- no way is Dreamwidth doing the same sort of thing as Twitter or Facebook or the various other places where people hang out.
The different places are not fungible and they are different ecological niches.
I do different things involving different people on Twitter than I do here -
And some things which have gone the way of the dodo I still mourn, there were listservs which had lively debates back in the day and while there are still one or two maybe still going like that, the main set of academic listservs I'm still subscribed to are not conducive to the same back and forth (may be network-dependent?).
I've also been thinking - while thinking of 'social media' as comprising this diversity of spaces and potentialities of interaction - of the discourse that it's a horrible snakepit of toxicity.
And okay, there is a lot of that, but there are also a lot of unhistoric acts of pleasantness and random acts of kindness and positive connections? And people giving good advice? In various places.
Perhaps it is not entirely a Pollyannaish glow of positivity to shaming-quote-tweet anything which invokes 'dusty archives' especially if somebody purports to have discovered something 'lost' in them. Or point people at more reliable sources for certain canards about the Victorians... But at least I'm not actually deliverately searching out instances, just tackling them when they cross my horizon?
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Date: 2022-04-28 02:14 pm (UTC)I agree re the supposed 'snakepit of toxicity'.
I sometimes (by virtue of some individuals I follow on Twitter) see in passing interactions that are unpleasant, but they are not interactions I need to participate in or even explore -- they are easily spotted and avoided.
And I have often received -- on Twitter and Facebook -- good and relevant advice, or been cheered up by something intended to do exactly that.
I have established my presence 'just in case' on a couple of Twitter alternatives, but have no intention of actually doing anything with the accounts.
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Date: 2022-04-28 07:21 pm (UTC)I've initiated 'just in case' but am beginning to feel I Am Too Old For All This.... pass my antimaccassar
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Date: 2022-04-28 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 07:20 pm (UTC)This 'because it is better' perhaps hearks back to my recent post about moralising about food....
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Date: 2022-04-28 07:45 pm (UTC)But also, in places where anyone can set up a social site, anyone often does, and doing Research to figure out what kind of person the admin is and what kind of use they will attract is more difficult to do, unless you are already familiar with them and their circles.
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Date: 2022-04-28 04:55 pm (UTC)That's absurd, of course, but the same people repeating "snakepit of toxicity" tend to also subsrcibe to the definition of the week club. I.e. it's only social media if it's currently in the news, and the news always contains more bad than good.
Certainly there are plenty of trolls out there, and would-be hackers, and corporations making money off advertising and privacy violation. Plus the originators of the advertisements, which don't need to include any iota of truth, whether they come from a Russian troll farm, a fake-reviews-for-hire team, or the most reputable brand in America.
Meanwhile, if you use privacy controls intelligently, and stay away from software that lacks decent user control, or has other features that tend to encourage bad behaviour, you get to deal with real people, most of whom are basically friendly online, just as they tend to be basically friendly face to face. Every once in a while you need to black hole someone's comments, or their ability to read your messages, in whatever way works on your system, but that's uncommon enough that when it comes up, I generally have to check the help site for how to do it - I've forgotten whatever technique I used the last time I needed it.
That said, some topics and sites are honeypots for bad behaviour. Discussing politics with random strangers pretty much constitutes volunteering for a flame war. Wikpedia (of all things) seems to be a magnet for people with axes to grind, though it's still possible to simply work on improving the encyclopedia, provided you dodge the hot buttons.
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Date: 2022-04-28 07:11 pm (UTC)Alas, I know somebody part of whose job involves running editathons to improve coverage of women in STEM, and that is apparently a hot button for certain blokes with edit privileges who have NEVERERD of women who were, no, really, important figures, but because they hadn't heard of them, couldn't possibly be.
The media is always going to be more interested in sensation-shock-horror, whether it's twitter-fights or kids doing dodgy stuff on YouTube/TikTok, than people being nice to one another - as Jay Rayner noted in his recent collection, the massive number of hits on his reviews are for the (minor percentage of) adverse ones, not the positives.
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Date: 2022-04-28 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-28 05:57 pm (UTC)you and me both :/
i first began this account about a decade ago when LJ had that Russkie-melodrama situation... and i only did that (as well as get a Facebook account) when every one of my friends left LJ and i had to deal with listening to crickets over on that site (it was literally terrifying)...
as for the sites with Twitter and FB, i found that they are really serving tablet/cell-fon users; whereas places like LJ & DW, you can find more used by those who have an old-fashioned keyboard (computers and laptops)...
on the blog-sites also, i tended to see friends who would write actual journal entries, reviews, etc... again, this is not the sort of thing i expect to see posted by those on the fons...
"And some things which have gone the way of the dodo I still mourn, there were listservs which had lively debates back in the day––"
whilst i tear my blouse and gnash my teeth.... i obviously grok you on this...
i think that this had much to do with who had access to the internet "back in the day".... about 3 decades ago (in my 20s) it was mostly highly educated folks who had access to computers and wanted to use them...
the technology has changed so much that make it obvious that someone can be near illiterate to access social media (txt-speak is proof of this)...
let us be honest as to the desires & interests of the majority of social-media users compared to the minority of the academics who are just treading-water out in those websites ––– there tends to be little common ground..
it makes me wish we had a "secret club" for those of us who wish to discuss things (and not fear making everyone yawn and turn into bullies)...
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Date: 2022-04-28 07:16 pm (UTC)There is certainly a difference between the desktop or at least laptop user and the phone/tablet generation. Of course back in the day it was more of a faff to set things up - especially getting online!
I have some lively back and forth sometimes on Twitter with academic friends and acquaintances but it's a bit limited.
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Date: 2022-04-28 07:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-29 05:46 pm (UTC)LJ was fine for a while (I recall fondly the Battle of the Multiverse and the Super-Soakers), but nothing else seems, as others have pointed out, to have hit that very particular niche.
Oh well. I expect Twitter will go the way of all electronic communication communities, to be replaced eventually in its turn.
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