Your points on relationship overload and real-world social replacement feel only half-right. A big part of what makes the internet feel so hollow is the near impossibility of actually having a connection given how “social” networks are designed. All of these places allow for pseudonymous or anonymous profiles and even if presenting as “y…
Your points on relationship overload and real-world social replacement feel only half-right. A big part of what makes the internet feel so hollow is the near impossibility of actually having a connection given how “social” networks are designed. All of these places allow for pseudonymous or anonymous profiles and even if presenting as “you” the costs to engage in social interaction and to disengage are so small, and the pool of people so large that there’s just nothing there. On this site I am a name and an initial with a blob of color. I expect no one to recognize me from the few other comments I’ve made, and if they do I don’t expect them to remember much of me or have much of a sense of who I am. I expect to maybe get one or two likes for my comment at most, probably no reply, and if I do get a reply I’ll probably feel little interest in responding, and if I do it will be a response to an abstract idea and not to a person, as I’ll probably pay as little attention to who replied as they did to me, other than the words being expressed. In most online spaces, unless you are the debatably fortunate few to have a “following”, you as a person have no substance, and it is only the memes you propagate (in the academic and internet-culture sense) that have any life. And yet here I am posting this comment, for reasons I can’t entirely understand
Your points on relationship overload and real-world social replacement feel only half-right. A big part of what makes the internet feel so hollow is the near impossibility of actually having a connection given how “social” networks are designed. All of these places allow for pseudonymous or anonymous profiles and even if presenting as “you” the costs to engage in social interaction and to disengage are so small, and the pool of people so large that there’s just nothing there. On this site I am a name and an initial with a blob of color. I expect no one to recognize me from the few other comments I’ve made, and if they do I don’t expect them to remember much of me or have much of a sense of who I am. I expect to maybe get one or two likes for my comment at most, probably no reply, and if I do get a reply I’ll probably feel little interest in responding, and if I do it will be a response to an abstract idea and not to a person, as I’ll probably pay as little attention to who replied as they did to me, other than the words being expressed. In most online spaces, unless you are the debatably fortunate few to have a “following”, you as a person have no substance, and it is only the memes you propagate (in the academic and internet-culture sense) that have any life. And yet here I am posting this comment, for reasons I can’t entirely understand