What I'm doing here
So. I haven't posted here in over a year, so why the random pop-in last night? Well. It all has to do with Twitter. Kind of.
LiveJournal isn't near the active, happening place it used to be. In fact, when I logged back in I was un-surprised to find that of the last 50 posts, all but a handful were either automatic re-tweets or from one brave soul who seems to refuse to give up on actually using LJ as a journal. I'm not entirely sure of when the decline started, but I tend to put a lot of the blame on Twitter. There seemed to have been something of a mass-exodus of folks there using it as the de-facto social networking site, so I inevitably followed along.
A little over a month ago, I finally purged my twitter account (I re-registered it just to keep the name reserved but otherwise I am leaving it as an abandoned account). I had something of a tumultuous history with Twitter, having de-activated and re-activated my account a few times, but finally I got fed up.
I think the problem for me is what Twitter was designed to be. The SMS length messages are great for encapsulating quick snippets of thought or one off comments, photos on the go, and things like that. What ends up happening is that you get an enormous breadth of information that is incredibly shallow - short of typing something up that spans multiple tweets or using some service that hosts "expanded" tweets, it's impossible to share what you are thinking or feeling other than a painfully short synopsis. It winds up presenting little more than a veneer of the tweeter, only the vaguest impression of who someone is and what they are thinking and feeling. Building any kind of community on these thin veneers results in a community that is as shallow as the tweets themselves. Instead of friends you have followers, people who are nominally interested in what you have to say - so long as it doesn't comprise more than 140 characters.
The SMS based foundation of Twitter also means that it is, by design, a conversational sort of exchange. It's like sending out a sort of mass-SMS to all of the contacts that you have in your phone's contact list, and then anytime someone sends you a response, it is, again, mass-sent to everyone on your list. Perhaps this is supposed to foster the sense of community, but to me it seems to do little other than create a sort of echo chamber. You complain to Twitter that you are having a headache, and you get a few sympathetic "Aww" responses. Now everyone knows you have a headache, and everyone knows who is being sympathetic. Great, I suppose. But I found it frustrating to be seeing these conversational snippets between people in a disjointed fashion, and worse, when I only saw half the conversation because another user who was not a mutual friend was a protected account and I did not follow. Very, very confusing.
For me, at least, these things tended to result in a sense of isolation and frustration. Rather than my being able to open up in a semi-public fashion, I was confined to trying to distill my thoughts into a few scant words. Seeing the panoply of conversations going on around me rather than wit me made me feel small and insignificant; since the conversations were all going on concurrently, mine became just a small voice in a very very large crowd. Ultimately it was frustrating and unfulfilling and I had to pull the plug. I've not regretted it for an instant.
So why back here, if there's no one left to hear me? Perhaps it's not important that I be heard, at least not nearly as important that I say what I need to say. Perhaps actually using a journal without any care as to who responds, and not feeling constrained by character limits or the need to generate responses in the echo chamber is what I really need. Or perhaps I'm deluding myself again, and I'll give up after a little while.
Who knows. But for now, here I am.
LiveJournal isn't near the active, happening place it used to be. In fact, when I logged back in I was un-surprised to find that of the last 50 posts, all but a handful were either automatic re-tweets or from one brave soul who seems to refuse to give up on actually using LJ as a journal. I'm not entirely sure of when the decline started, but I tend to put a lot of the blame on Twitter. There seemed to have been something of a mass-exodus of folks there using it as the de-facto social networking site, so I inevitably followed along.
A little over a month ago, I finally purged my twitter account (I re-registered it just to keep the name reserved but otherwise I am leaving it as an abandoned account). I had something of a tumultuous history with Twitter, having de-activated and re-activated my account a few times, but finally I got fed up.
I think the problem for me is what Twitter was designed to be. The SMS length messages are great for encapsulating quick snippets of thought or one off comments, photos on the go, and things like that. What ends up happening is that you get an enormous breadth of information that is incredibly shallow - short of typing something up that spans multiple tweets or using some service that hosts "expanded" tweets, it's impossible to share what you are thinking or feeling other than a painfully short synopsis. It winds up presenting little more than a veneer of the tweeter, only the vaguest impression of who someone is and what they are thinking and feeling. Building any kind of community on these thin veneers results in a community that is as shallow as the tweets themselves. Instead of friends you have followers, people who are nominally interested in what you have to say - so long as it doesn't comprise more than 140 characters.
The SMS based foundation of Twitter also means that it is, by design, a conversational sort of exchange. It's like sending out a sort of mass-SMS to all of the contacts that you have in your phone's contact list, and then anytime someone sends you a response, it is, again, mass-sent to everyone on your list. Perhaps this is supposed to foster the sense of community, but to me it seems to do little other than create a sort of echo chamber. You complain to Twitter that you are having a headache, and you get a few sympathetic "Aww" responses. Now everyone knows you have a headache, and everyone knows who is being sympathetic. Great, I suppose. But I found it frustrating to be seeing these conversational snippets between people in a disjointed fashion, and worse, when I only saw half the conversation because another user who was not a mutual friend was a protected account and I did not follow. Very, very confusing.
For me, at least, these things tended to result in a sense of isolation and frustration. Rather than my being able to open up in a semi-public fashion, I was confined to trying to distill my thoughts into a few scant words. Seeing the panoply of conversations going on around me rather than wit me made me feel small and insignificant; since the conversations were all going on concurrently, mine became just a small voice in a very very large crowd. Ultimately it was frustrating and unfulfilling and I had to pull the plug. I've not regretted it for an instant.
So why back here, if there's no one left to hear me? Perhaps it's not important that I be heard, at least not nearly as important that I say what I need to say. Perhaps actually using a journal without any care as to who responds, and not feeling constrained by character limits or the need to generate responses in the echo chamber is what I really need. Or perhaps I'm deluding myself again, and I'll give up after a little while.
Who knows. But for now, here I am.