Where have all the postings gone... long time passing...
So, forgive me if this is a dumb question, but where did everyone go?
A forced change to livejournal (friend's page no longer accepts custom styles) has pushed me to go to each of the friends that I follow and resubscribe to their individual pages.
And I keep seeing a wasteland. So many last updates that say things like '2010', '2009', '2007'. Where did everyone go? I see posts from the same dozen people on a regular basis, but there used to be a lot more people out there.
So where did everyone go?
I know about Twitter. I'm there, but the posts are short and stream by. Don't get me started about Facebook. The drek drowns out the good stuff all too often. And too much is stuffed onto one page. Tumblr? Pinterest? Pretty, but mostly empty from what I've seen.
Where do people go to actually.... write? Journal to their social network? Connect?
And I know, for the longest time I've written on my own wordpress blog and crossposted to LJ (and now... FB too. Not that I go there myself). So I'm one of those people who is 'not there' in some sense. [EDIT: Hah! Something since my last posting on 2/21 has broken crossposting! What the F! Yay!]
I accept that my social life isn't what it was. But looking at the data while redoing the LJ connections... man, it really isn't what it used to be. And a lot of it used to be keeping connected to people on LJ in a way that I just don't feel connected on other network sites. And these days I'm not feeling connected to many people at all. So here I send out a post into what seems to be an ever fading arena, knowing that the dozens of people who haven't updated in five years aren't going to see it, just as I don't see anything from them.
Part of me wonders when a social network connection is so underutilized that it should be pruned entirely. I've readded these dead connections. IT doesn't cost me much at all. No posts means nothing shows up in my feeds. No words require me to triage their value and exert neurons to process them. And if someone does come back, the connection is still there. But perhaps there is an unseen, unknown weight and drag from these old connections.
I feel like I've missed some secret. That all these connections have been moved somewhere else, and I'm the one who wasn't told about it, or doesn't know how to get to them. Is there some way to make Facebook functional? Or have people given up on the concept of social networks entirely? Did people move to some site that died or never thrived (xanga, myspace, Google+) and then never have the heart to try again? I know, again, I'm asking this of the wrong audience, because the only audience that will see it is almost definitionally the wrong one. Am I echolocating across a featureless plain? Only getting back what I already know to be there?
A forced change to livejournal (friend's page no longer accepts custom styles) has pushed me to go to each of the friends that I follow and resubscribe to their individual pages.
And I keep seeing a wasteland. So many last updates that say things like '2010', '2009', '2007'. Where did everyone go? I see posts from the same dozen people on a regular basis, but there used to be a lot more people out there.
So where did everyone go?
I know about Twitter. I'm there, but the posts are short and stream by. Don't get me started about Facebook. The drek drowns out the good stuff all too often. And too much is stuffed onto one page. Tumblr? Pinterest? Pretty, but mostly empty from what I've seen.
Where do people go to actually.... write? Journal to their social network? Connect?
And I know, for the longest time I've written on my own wordpress blog and crossposted to LJ (and now... FB too. Not that I go there myself). So I'm one of those people who is 'not there' in some sense. [EDIT: Hah! Something since my last posting on 2/21 has broken crossposting! What the F! Yay!]
I accept that my social life isn't what it was. But looking at the data while redoing the LJ connections... man, it really isn't what it used to be. And a lot of it used to be keeping connected to people on LJ in a way that I just don't feel connected on other network sites. And these days I'm not feeling connected to many people at all. So here I send out a post into what seems to be an ever fading arena, knowing that the dozens of people who haven't updated in five years aren't going to see it, just as I don't see anything from them.
Part of me wonders when a social network connection is so underutilized that it should be pruned entirely. I've readded these dead connections. IT doesn't cost me much at all. No posts means nothing shows up in my feeds. No words require me to triage their value and exert neurons to process them. And if someone does come back, the connection is still there. But perhaps there is an unseen, unknown weight and drag from these old connections.
I feel like I've missed some secret. That all these connections have been moved somewhere else, and I'm the one who wasn't told about it, or doesn't know how to get to them. Is there some way to make Facebook functional? Or have people given up on the concept of social networks entirely? Did people move to some site that died or never thrived (xanga, myspace, Google+) and then never have the heart to try again? I know, again, I'm asking this of the wrong audience, because the only audience that will see it is almost definitionally the wrong one. Am I echolocating across a featureless plain? Only getting back what I already know to be there?