cereal robots ario's ubercoolisch blog

The demise of real sharing

"No one ever ever knows anyone. You're not ever gonna know me."

-Sean Batemon, from this.

It hit me today that I don't *really* know what's going on with my friends as much as I did when I was a little kid... all the way up until the dawn of Facebook.  Allow me to extrapolate...

As a child of the 80s and 90s, I had a relatively small social circle that I primarily interacted with in person.  I always had a good sense of how my friends were feeling, what they looked like, and what they were up to.

This continued all through college and even while the internet was getting more popular, the number of online friends I had was small and I continued to mainly interact with my friends in real life.

When I graduated college in 2000, the internet had become pretty mainstream and I was introduced to the world of LiveJournal which created a new form of friendship.  Because LJ was used for both silly and serious things, you could actually get a sense for what a person was like.

People would share some things publicly, some privately and there was a social norm that made it ok to follow the journal of a stranger.  Since most people used aliases and there was no set standard for using a real profile picture, there was a freedom that allowed for deeper self expression.  There was room for bumping into strangers and turning virtual friends into real friends.  It feels like those days are long gone and I really miss that.

A few reasons why...

• Friendster was the beginning of the end.  Once a social site was no longer about self expression, but purely focused on illustrating the social graph, the emphasis was no longer on ideas, thoughts, and feelings... it became all about who and how many people you were connected to
• Then came MySpace which allowed a bit more for expression than Friendster with custom profile pages and bulletin board posts.  Some people shared things there, but they were never the kind of personal posts you'd find on LJ
• After that came Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr which is where we are today.  These sites may have taken us the furthest away from creating quality content than any other preceding social network.  They are optimized for short bursts of communication... and lend themselves more towards showcasing the thoughts and creations of others, rather than our own.

While it's been great to have tools that expose people to interesting things, I fear that their convenience has taken away much of the incentive for self-expression.  Why take the time and expend the mental energy to create something new when you can just share the work of others?

Facebook and Twitter reinforce this mode of communication largely through their UI.  Just compare the text box size for saying something in Facebook vs LiveJournal..

Telling your friends your innermost thoughts requires a lot more room than a system optimized for link sharing or how long the line is at the DMV.

I should also mention that I don't think all communication needs to be of the "real" variety... sharing trivialities is also important... it just feels off when it's too much of one or the other.  There's a quote on this I like but can't remember the source of... something like "If all your communication is deep, then that's not a relationship, that's therapy."

Facebook does provide some outlet for longer form content via their blog-style Notes feature, but it's tucked away in the interface and mostly serves as a way to syndicate content from a blog hosted elsewhere.

So now we find ourselves in a world where as we get older, our friends move to other cities, making us even more reliant on the web to stay in touch.  At the same time, tools that support deeper sharing with those you care about most are severely lacking.  Well, the tools are out there, but no one's really paying attention to them.  (And when it comes to LJ specifically, I'm not sure how much longer I entrust my content to their parent company, SUP).

Some reasons why deeper sharing seems to be going away:

• Facebook and Twitter style posts are easier to create and over time, have become the norm of what we expect from one another
• Monetarily, there's no incentive for Facebook or Twitter to encourage privately shared content.  If they can't mine your content and show relevant ads next to it, then why bother encouraging that use case?
• As we get older, our desire to share with others goes down.  We're probably paired up and find that confiding in a partner enough of an outlet... or we just give less of a damn in general.

And even if Facebook were to provide a better experience around privately shared posts to groups, would you trust them to really keep your stuff private?  They've changed around their privacy controls so much over their short history, it's a case of the boy who cried wolf, even if they did want to support this.

As for LiveJournal, I feel their days are numbered (at least in my social circle).  Fewer and fewer posts show up there, particularly of the friends-only variety that I enjoyed reading between 2001 to 2008.

A few last thoughts:

• Consumption isn't cool
• If you're a friend and we haven't spoken in awhile, I'd really like to know what you're up to and how you're doing... preferably over a meal in Zurich! but email works too
• Social sites should look beyond the all mighty dollar and try to facilitate deeper connections between people instead of allowing us to bombard each other with distractions

Over n' out!