The networks

Lately a lot of links about social media and the networks we use to connect online have popped up in my feed reader or my email. So I’ve been thinking a lot about networks and how we connect online. I have thoughts, many thoughts, and I’ve started this post so many times, but then left it alone. But I wanted to collect the various things I’ve been reading in one spot at the very least.

I’ve read Mandy’s two separate posts about how she’s using syndication. Alan Jacobs response to the first of those posts. I watched Erin Kissane’s XOXO talk from this year where the big call to action is to fix the networks. I’ve read about the explosion of users on Bluesky and the idea of nostalgia in all of this and the idea that text may not be the thing. And this quote that made me nod emphatically:

As someone who came of age online and on social media, learning how to comport myself into legibility is a familiar act. Lately, it’s more of an uncomfortable act. (There’s probably an entire essay on The Internet We Lost to write some day.) There has never been more distance between who I appear to be online and who I am in my actual life. I relish in the distance. I’m simply unwilling to try and capture the tensions, frustrations, delights, complexities of my exquisite human life on these apps. They don’t deserve it.

I’m sure there’s even more being said that I don’t know about as I’m not on any social media networks and I’m not as involved in the world these conversations are happening in as I was in the past. All of this has raised a lot of questions for me, ones that I’m not sure I want to ask in an open space like this. But I do wonder this, do folks who aren’t as involved in the tech world think about these things? And what is it about this conversation that has me thinking about it so much? I’m really not sure, but maybe, if I can come to anything approaching a thoughtful post I’ll share them, or else I’ll continue to wonder and think and read.