jducoeur | The genuinely *social* media app

Entry tags:

commyou,
technology

The genuinely social media app

One idea that's been making the rounds this month is the point that social media is anti-social. The linked article is talking mainly about the problem of people who are partly online while they're meeting in real life (and is inspired by the Social Media Breakfast I was at earlier this month), but I think there's a larger issue here.

I'll put a stake in the ground here, and I'll be interested to see if folks agree or disagree: LJ, Facebook and systems like them are in a very real sense *distancing*. The problem is subtle, and not obvious -- after all, we *know* so much about our friends due to these systems that they obviously bring us closer together, right? But the thing is, they take up a lot of our time in doing so, and they train us to interact in this mode. And it isn't at all clear to me that that's good for us, at least when it's carried too far.

This arises from my observation that my friends seem, by and large, to be less social and more depressed than they used to be. Not in a huge dramatic way, but on average the numbers seem a bit down. We don't get together in real life quite as much as we used to, and we don't have as much to talk about when we do. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that LJ is part of the problem. It takes up a lot of our time, and it *feels* like we're scratching the social itch with it. And we're getting to talk about everything on it. So we don't have as much time to get together, and a lot of our topic space is already exhausted.

And the thing is, I don't think that actually matches human wiring. We're social creatures, and I suspect that talking online isn't quite "social" in the way we're designed for. I get the distinct impression that we need a fair amount of face-to-face contact with friends to be happy, and we're not meeting that need.

Being a good geek, my reaction is of course to try and come up with a technical solution to this -- possibly silly and inappropriate, but one possible tack. So I've just added the "go get a soda" story to CommYou. It's a long ways down the list, and I don't know exactly what it means yet, but the initial idea is that, if you're sitting there clicking refresh, the best thing the system can do for you is to encourage you to get the hell away from the computer and get together with people in real life.

I suspect that the problem is going to need a bunch of exploring in order to get it right, but everything tells me that there's a necessary evolution looming here. Too much of social media is currently designed to chain you to the damned machine, but I don't think that's actually good for you. So responsible apps are going to need to recognize that they're part of the problem, and figure out how to be solutions instead...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for the pointer - and, yeah, I agree. I think one thing that surprises N sometimes is when we're lying in bed and I'll poke him on the shoulder and tell him that I miss him. Physically he's there, but he's got his laptop out and he's chatting away with 3 or 4 IM conversations.

I know I personally used to use LJ for organizing more f2f activities, but I think that's fallen off as I've spent more time here and gotten to know more (non-local) people. It seems silly to spend a message to 150 people when my audience is 20, but keeping up with filters becomes cumbersome.

but the initial idea is that, if you're sitting there clicking refresh, the best thing the system can do for you is to encourage you to get the hell away from the computer and get together with people in real life.

The Wii has occasional pop-up screens to encourage you to go out and play, but I don't know that they work. Consciously, no. Subconsciously?? Dunno.

"I think one thing that surprises N sometimes is when we're lying in bed and I'll poke him on the shoulder and tell him that I miss him. Physically he's there, but he's got his laptop out and he's chatting away with 3 or 4 IM conversations."

I have this issue with Marc sometimes, though it's usually when we're out somewhere and he takes moments sometimes to text various people.

Though, I am certainly guilty of the laptop thing.

this sends me to thinking about an activities cue, perhaps a community calendar, wherein if I post an activity, my friends can see it and perhaps sign up. Signing up ( clicking through ) would include things like directions or the URL, so kind of a twitter-meetup.

Also, could I request a change from "soda" to "water"? I love soda, it loves me...

I'll put a stake in the ground here, and I'll be interested to see if folks agree or disagree: LJ, Facebook and systems like them are in a very real sense *distancing*. The problem is subtle, and not obvious -- after all, we *know* so much about our friends due to these systems that they obviously bring us closer together, right?

I generally agree. What people don't realize is that text (e-mails, blog posts, twitters, what have you) is about the lowest bandwidth of communication available. It is conveniently asynchronous, but folks fool themselves into thinking they know even a fraction of what a person is thinking, feeling, or experiencing by reading their blog.

However, I think it important to note that it isn't the systems distancing us. The systems just trick us into not noticing that we are distant for other reasons. Modern life was distancing people from each other long before the systems came up. Modern life distances us.

I find that I have a hard time striking up a face-to-face conversation with people I know primarily in LJ. "I know this person, and they know me, but we've never been properly introduced, and they don't recognize me to give me any signals to bring me in to their conversation, so I feel uncomfortable walking up to them..."

I remember, at Pennsic, standing outside a group of i Sebastiani folks, trying to figure out how I could get myself included in their circle, and gave up because I had no way of getting the attention of anyone who knew me enough to include me. This was through no fault of the people there: they didn't know my face, and it was at a crowded party, so many random people were there.

Mostly, I just need to be willing to walk up and say "Hi, I'm P" more often.

And, I need to recognize when people are standing around the periphery of a group, looking like they want to belong, and take the initiative to say hello and include them.

Yeah, I do think that personality has a key role in this. Many people who are heavy users of social networking sites tend to have a bit more social awkwardness to begin with, so they have trouble socializing in real life, hence their preference of SN sites. It took me a long time to gather up the courage to be one of those people who strikes up conversations at random, but it has become second nature now and actually has turned me into a rather friendly, outgoing person, which I was not before.

I've had several situations where I was bold and introduced myself to people at events, and they said, in effect, "Oh! I know who you are, you look just like your LJ icon!" And then we proceeded to have a good chat.

So possibly use of a photo icon would help you.

Yes, I've had this same experience with the photo icon.

In fact, when my SCAdian icon (used here) was my default, everyone assumed that I had long hair (all medievalists have long hair, don't they?). I can't count the number of times I'd walk up to sign into an event (without any hair covering yet), hand over my blue card, and watch the other person's jaw drop. OMG, what happened to your hair? Um, it's been above my jawline for the past several years...

I have to disagree. It's only true the LJ, Facebook and so forth are distancing if you live close to your friends. My friends all live seventy to 250 miles away (or more). I can't just pop over and see them. I can see where it might be true when your friends are within a T-ride.

It's also not true for people who work offshift. I work second shift, and couldn't have a social life during the week even if it was available.

...That said, I have to remember to socialize with my husband and not IM so much when he's here. Though he doesn't mind the IM so much as he minds my writing.

I dunno. I mean, with LJ, I can say - "see, I have friends, I just don't see them that often because they all live on the other side of DC. I talk to them every day." And I tell myself that I'm well adjusted and normal... and I still feel lonely.

If I didn't have LJ, would I be spending more effort meeting my neighbors (I know no one, and I live in a townhouse) or doing local activities to actually meet people who live on *this* side of DC?

I can't write an adequate response at work, but I would love to continue this conversation at great length. I have a lot of thoughts on this both from personal experience and from professional interests.

Ironically, I parsed the phrase "partly online while they're meeting in real life" in its most literal sense, bringing to mind a conversation with someone recently about people surfing the web while talking to someone on the phone (rather than focusing just on the phone conversation). I think behaviors like that, as well as American tendencies toward multitasking and what I call "interruption culture" (where, for instance, one's cell phone ringing is always automatically more important than whatever else they were doing) also tie into this area.

Oh.... interruption culture.... that's an interesting thought.

Sometimes I'll be at my desk talking with my supervisor, and the phone will ring - it's Nathaniel. Well, my supervisor is more important (at a work setting) than my sweetie, so a few times I let it go to voicemail. It really *bothered* my supervisor to sit there while my phone was ringing (even after I said that it was N and I'd call him back).

And sometimes I'll text N when he's at work - a reminder to pick up something on his way home or ask for a specific day off or something. I don't want to call and interrupt whatever he's doing, but I do want to get a message to him...just whenever he gets a chance to get to it.

But it's clear from his quick responses that he checks them right away. I'm the same about email, too.

I see "interruption culture" in two intertwined contexts, both work and personal. There are similarities and differences between the two, but the crux of it is that someone else's unknown needs/demands/whatever - in the form of a cell phone ring or drop-by or whatever else - are by default placed ahead of whatever you were already doing. If someone walks up to your up at work, do you stop whatever you're doing, no matter how urgent? If you're out with friends and your cell phone rings, do you answer it? (The generic rhetorical "you", not anyone personally.)

The kicker is that there is no way for either side to know pre-interruption whether or not the interruption is actually important enough to warrant setting aside the current activity. I don't know when I call you whether you're looking at LOLcats or trying to keep dinner from boiling over, and you don't know when I call if I just wanted to tell you a joke I heard, or whether something terrible just happened to me. So it's hard to easily find a compromise or an appropriate gague of importance. (Since discouraging anyone from interrupting/contacting anyone ever is decidedly not the solution.)

My workplace has an enormous interruption culture, which is one of the larger reasons I'm looking to leave. With ADD issues, this makes it almost impossible for me to maintain the focus needed to do my work. In addition, because everyone is always interrupting everyone else, and no one stops or mediates it, nothing ever gets done as scheduled, meetings are pushed infinitely aside, and it all becomes a huge downward spiral.

In my personal life, I am frequently misunderstood and looked at askance for things like ignoring my cell phone, but that's my choice. As much as possible, I prefer to control my tech instead of it controlling me, but many people don't see their invisible chains that way.

One of the thousand experiments in CommYou is actually addressed towards this: the Urgent feature. The notion is that, when I post something, I can mark it as Urgent; you, as the reader, can decide whether you want to treat Urgent messages differently. For instance, you might forward notifications of Urgent posts to SMS or IM, whereas you pull the rest at your leisure from the website. The definition of "Urgent" is deliberately vague; I'm expecting people to develop social mechanisms to define it.

It'll be a while before I implement that, but it'll be interesting to see whether it proves useful...

See, what's interesting to me is that I actually tend to use social networks (or at least, LJ and OKCupid) to meet people in real life. I have made many, many "real life" friends on LJ, and have visited them in their various locations. I now know someone in most major US cities, so whenever I'm going somewhere, I check with my friends-list to see if anyone in the area wants to get together for coffee or whatnot. There are also certain communities on LJ (such as

b0st0n where we all get together on a regular basis, even though the community has no common interest other than location) that will sometimes get together to some degree outside of the internet. Hell, I used the LJ Community that I run for my college to help people meet new friends, when I was there, by using it to organize get-togethers.

Similarly, most of my friends from college now live at least a moderate distance away (2-5 hours), so when they read my LJ, it gives us stuff to talk about when I come to visit.

But, I am highly unusual, it seems.

What I think needs to come about is combining something like LJ with something like MeetUp. It's like taking the LJ Community idea and taking it another step further.

Edited 2008-04-16 18:10 (UTC)

Yeah -- that's sort of the direction I'm thinking of. Actively using CommYou to encourage RL meet-ups. There's a long, long ways to go before I'm ready for that, but it might be one of the most socially useful features of the system, if I can figure out an approach that makes sense...

I'll put a stake in the ground here, and I'll be interested to see if folks agree or disagree: LJ, Facebook and systems like them are in a very real sense *distancing*.

I can tell you of ways that LJ has been a way of making me closer to people and also a way of making myself more distant.

I can make the same claim about phone technologies and email.

This makes me think your thesis is weak.

Well, keep in mind that I'm not claiming to have an especially strong thesis here -- in terms of explanation, I'm still guessing. I'm mostly observing trends and correlations, and trying to figure out what's going on. (My stakes in the ground are pretty much always just the first step in surveying the terrain.)

That said: yes, there are other similar technologies. But I observe that the *usage* of LJ is quite different from that of those technologies. I mean, I've been a heavy email user for about as long as such a concept has existed, and I've rarely seen people open up to each other, or discuss in quite the depth that they often do on LJ. The closest I've seen is well-focused mailing lists, but they tend to have a less strong personal/social dynamic. So the comparison is far from precise. Don't know why that might be -- possibly the community-oriented nature of social networks, and the wide dispersion of the messages thereupon, change the social dynamic from the more point-to-point style of phone and email.

Indeed, that's one of the bases of CommYou -- that communal conversation is different from either one-to-one or simple broadcast. I don't pretend to fully understand all the ways in which it is alike and different, but I'm pretty sure it *is* different in a bunch of ways, and I'm actively exploring that space...

I somewhat agree with this. I have noticed many times when I am hanging out with people (IRL... silly acronyms), that conversation about a topic may not happen very much because it was already broached online, and the assumption may be that any discussion of the topic would have already happened there. Or it may be avoided because some people have already discussed it online, and therefore the topic would only be of interest to those who don't know about it, and they will often get referred back to the online realm. ("Oh, I wrote about it on LJ...")

That said, there have also been cases where I have deliberately brought up a topic that was first broached online. ("I saw your post about foo.") Sometimes I don't say all my thoughts on a topic online, and can explore the topic more interactively in real life. Like now. I'm going to withhold some of my thoughts for later discussion.

"it *feels* like we're scratching the social itch with it."

I am sure the conclusion you mean, here, is that this is illusory, although you didn't say it in that many words.

However, I strongly suspect that this will vary depending on the person. LJ may be enough to *actually* scratch the social itch of some people, and be woefully inadequate for other people.

I do agree with you that "a lot of our topic space is already exhausted." I've had the experience of standing with a friend, trying to think of what to say, when I'm all up to date on the top-level news in their life. The solution here may be to be willing to go beyond the everyday conversations, now that those are out of the way and accounted for with LJ, into more depth or possible edginess. This does somewhat mean intentional agreement to break social conventions of party conversation, though.

LJ may be enough to *actually* scratch the social itch of some people, and be woefully inadequate for other people.

That may very well be. My concern is largely a worry that the illusion may fool people into thinking they are more in the former group than they really are. I could particularly imagine that being the case for medium-grade introverts, who are prone to seeking excuses not to interact too much face-to-face -- and that category accounts for a *lot* of my friends. (As well as myself.)

Like junk food that satisfies hunger, but doesn't provide actual nutrients, sort of thing? For those who have started arguing over metaphors.

That's the direction I was thinking, yes. I'm not certain it's true, but it kinda feels like it might be...

These are tools. The question is not in the nature of the tool, but the nature of how someone uses it. Social networking tools can be used as an *adjunct* to real life, or as a substitute for it. Same as almost anything else social (email, telephones, paper letters). For that matter, reading can be a substitute for real life when someone would rather read about something than do it.

Completely true, and yet something of a cop-out. Tools have affordances. Tools have paths-of-least-resistance for use. Social tools have enormous force on the relationships that they mediate. It's reasonable to ask how various intermediating technologies shape the relationships they touch.

In a different context we would be discussing personal responsibility vs the force of the tool - for example, Prohibition vs Alcoholism. Yes, it's reasonable to discuss how a tool shapes the relationship, but it is vastly more useful to discuss how individuals (and groups) use the tool.

In a different context we would be discussing personal responsibility vs the force of the tool

Personal responsibility is what people should do. The affordances of the tool are what people do do. Arguments predicated on the idea that they pose a dilemma are intrinsically stupid arguments based on category errors.

Yes, it's reasonable to discuss how a tool shapes the relationship, but it is vastly more useful to discuss how individuals (and groups) use the tool.

How people use the tool is how the tool shapes the relationship. Those aren't alternatives.

Whatever you say...

Yaas -- which is why the question is particularly relevant and interesting to me. This post comes from me asking myself, "Is CommYou going to be part of A Problem?" And if so, what am I going to do about it? I suspect that I'm going to have to do a lot of groping around to figure that out, but I want to keep my eyes open, and get the question well lodged in the back of my brain, so I'm paying attention to what happens...

This arises from my observation that my friends seem, by and large, to be less social and more depressed than they used to be.

One of the phenomena I've found interesting about LJ is that people seem far more likely to disclose actual depression (or diagnoses of other mental illnesses) or cop to depressed mood via LJ than via face to face.

I say "seem" because they're telling people other than me. I've always had a large number of my friends confide their negative feelings and psychiatric diagnoses to me; but it always seemed that this was a rare behavior on their part (as demonstrated by it very clearly being an unrehearsed topic they didn't have stock narratives for, and had to search haltingly for words and phrased to express.)

So it's possible that you're seeing more evidence of depression and the blues because once someone has broached the topic to you in LJ, they're more willing to share that side of themselves with you when f2f.

In other words, you may be seeing a more authentic representation of people because of disclosures on LJ.

Or maybe there's more depression. :)

There's something I find telling here:

It takes up a lot of our time, and it *feels* like we're scratching the social itch with it. And we're getting to talk about everything on it. So we don't have as much time to get together, and a lot of our topic space is already exhausted.

This echos what other people have said, in comments and elsewhere, about "not having anything to talk about because it's all been said."

I find that, from a social psych standpoint, an enormously interesting sentiment, because it seems to imply certain ideas about the relationship of information sharing (i.e. self-disclosure), the subjective experience of "being social", and loneliness.

Ideas which are really interesting in light of them coming from a population (Scadians!) who have this massive cultural apparatus for socializing by doing things together. As opposed to by self-disclosure.

One of the phenomena I've found interesting about LJ is that people seem far more likely to disclose actual depression (or diagnoses of other mental illnesses) or cop to depressed mood via LJ than via face to face.

I think generally people seem more likely to disclose their troubles on LJ, whether they are depressed, physically ill, overdrawn their checking account, irate at their manager.... LJ is a venting system for many of its users. Also, more people are going to make a whiny post in their own journal than are going to respond to your IRL question "how are you?" with "Rotten, thanks."

Exactly, though I think it goes further than venting. As someone observed, LJ is "alt.fan.me": the organizing topic of one's journal is[*] one's self. If the what-is-going-on-in-one's-life are woes, that's what one has available to report on. Even if one is disinclined to vent, one winds up having to chose between not disclosing, "Still laid off, sent out another 30 resumes", and thus withdrawing from the discourse, or posting it to stay in. (A poker analogy suggests itself here.)

[* Well, can be. I have a post in me about this topic if I could only get my thoughts organized on it. ETA: Yay! Did it!]

Edited 2008-04-17 18:29 (UTC)

I certainly don't find that the case, because most of the people I communicate with on LJ and other blogs are people I wouldn't be communicating with at all otherwise. And I post infrequently enough on LJ that hardly anybody comments on my posts, so I'm unlikely to mistake that for actual social interaction. :-P

Really, the solution to all of these problems is procrastination and laziness. For my LJ friends who I do see in person, their LJ posts are about as likely to spark "oh, yeah, here's the comment I was going to make about that but never got around to it" as "we don't have anything to discuss because we already said it online."

I'd suggest making "go get a soda" customizable. For me, it should say "get back to work!" because if I'm sitting there hitting refresh, it's more likely to mean that I'm avoiding something else I should be doing on the computer rather than that I'm avoiding real life.

I would be happy to have a reminder to "look at something more than 18 inches from your face," too.

most of the people I communicate with on LJ and other blogs are people I wouldn't be communicating with at all otherwise.

Really? Interesting -- that's rather different from the situation I have, where most of my flist is folks who I am pretty close to in RL...

But would you really be communicating in real life with Jan, Alienor, Siderea? Or would you say they're people you wish you were in better touch with but have fallen away from/not seen in ages?

Perhaps a side-question to this:
Sometimes, we converse with people and we have no idea who they are - especially if their username is not related to a real name, or their icon picture is not of them.

Oh, absolutely. Keep in mind, I'm not questioning that LJ and systems like it have considerable value. (Given that all of these concerns are at *least* as applicable to CommYou, I'd be far more worried if I didn't believe that.) In the case of interacting with folks who I wouldn't normally see day-to-day, I think LJ is considerably better than the nothing that might otherwise be likely.

The concern is mainly focused on the usage of LJ as a *substitute* for face to face meetups that might otherwise happen -- interacting with the same people more by LJ and less IRL. I suspect that at least some of that is happening, and is producing a net loss in face-to-face conversation time. It isn't clear to me that that's entirely healthy...

In the case of interacting with folks who I wouldn't normally see day-to-day, I think LJ is considerably better than the nothing that might otherwise be likely.

I think this sort of misses the interesting part of

msmemory's question: are you so sure that you would normally see day-to-day those people? That's a really enormous assumption, essentially positing that either (1) those people or you are actively avoiding in-person contact you would otherwise have (!) or (2) those people or you are passively failing to have that contact, and LJ is somehow discouraging that contact.

To put it another way: LJ and related technologies may be masking changes in socialization patterns that lead one to fall out of in-person contact with people, as opposed to causing them. I'm an obvious and trivial example we've all agreed on, so let's use me, but not in the sense of considering my case representative of others, but handily more egregious:

Just about nobody in the local SCA is in any danger of happening to run into me in person and having a chat with me, because I no longer attend dance practice or Council or events. The vast majority of happy shooting-the-breeze most people had with me were in social adjuncts to those events. The list of people I made explicit appointments to socialize with was short in comparison with how many people socialized with me at events (and long in comparison with how many hours per day there are, which is why that list was only a fraction of people I like chatting with!) LJ allows me to continue to socialize "virtually" with people I most definitely wouldn't happen to encounter. And in my case, this is all terribly obvious because my ceasing to attend SCA stuff was pretty abrupt and then a function of this big fact about my life everyone knows, to wit, Siderea's in grad school.

But long, long before LJ (or, hell, the web) I'd been noticing that most Scadians were really unaware of when individuals in their social circle started reducing their activity. It's one thing if you have established a private personal relationship with that individual which involves either/both of you initiating private contact with the other; such a person you're likely to miss if they start missing dance practices. But it's something else if they aren't such a person, if they're, instead, one of the friendly faces you're partial to in that context. You may feel warmly to them and they may feel warmly to you, but it's still the case that your relationship -- and rate of contact -- is entirely mediated by your respective relationships to the venue (e.g. dance practice, or more generally the SCA) which is the social matrix of the relationship.

And I've always been flabbergasted at how bad so many Scadians seem to be at noticing this. I've actually heard people say things like, "I don't need the SCA; I'd still have my friends without it."

LJ is in a position to disguise shifts in social movement and happenstancial contact. Most people (at least, most of the N-dominated population I hang with and observe) don't have automatic tracking of venues by which they are socializing with others. They simply don't notice on an emotional level, "hey, I used to see this person 90% at fighter practice and 10% online, but now I see this person 60% at fighter practice and 40% online", if it's a boiled-frog transition and if 100% is still the same general amount in total. If asked, or given other reason to reflect, they may well notice (or not), but without prompting to reflect they probably won't.

So there's a real question whether you really would be socializing f2f with all the people you're thinking of as no longer socializing with f2f.

It's an interesting question, and I can't say I'm sure. Certainly you're correct about the way people quietly drift out of SCA circles, and that LJ makes that subtler -- I've observed the same phenomenon myself. I'm acutely aware of the fact that we lose track of friends who drift out of the SCA, since it has happened to me *so* many times. Indeed, one of the things that sometimes makes me feel a bit old is the number of whole generations I've watched this in.

That said, it does feel like there's something there -- subtle, perhaps, but I think there's an effect. It's strictly anecdotal, but it *feels* like we have fewer face-to-face get-togethers than we used to, even with the people who are still active, and the ones we have are shorter than they used to be. There could be other causes, of course, and it's possible that it's as much a matter of observer bias as anything, but it does *seem* like things have shifted, and I'm trying to understand what's going on there...

Well, let me amend that -- a lot of my LJ friends are people I see occasionally at parties and events, so it's not true that I wouldn't communicate with them at all. Out of that group, a number of them are people I'd like to socialize with more often, but that was equally the case pre-LJ, so I know that LJ isn't the cause or a substitute. If more of the people I do socialize with in person were on LJ, then I might have some useful input on your premise, but as it is, my case should probably be considered "no data" rather than an argument against.

I would note that a huge number of the people I consider in my social circles are long-distance, and in fact my presence on livejournal was initially intended to combat the specific social isolation of not having casual day-to-day contact be a transparent process at a range of three thousand miles.

Oh, sure -- it's clear to me that LJ is better than nothing. For most people, it's a chance to stay in touch with folks who would otherwise be too far away, and in some cases it's a real lifeline. But I suspect that it's less good than face to face communication, in terms of social "health", at least when it gets overused...

I made about 2/3 of a very long reply to this yesterday, but seem to have lost it. Whoops. Abbreviated version follows:

I'll put a stake in the ground here, and I'll be interested to see if folks agree or disagree: LJ, Facebook and systems like them are in a very real sense *distancing*.

I disagree. Sure, they can mask distancing, or be enablers for those inclined to hermit, and they aren't a true substitute for face-to-face interaction, but actively, intrinsically distancing? No.

I can't deny the possibility that there are friends who don't get together with me as much because they see me online. The reverse, however, isn't true; I cannot recall ever passing on a social occasion because either (a) I was too busy with online community, or (b) because I'd already seen the people in question online and wanted to do something else. (Unlike, eg, computer games, or cleaning my room, both of which have caused me to miss get-togethers in the past.)

On the other (anti-distancing) hand:
- LJ acts as a baseline keeping-in-touch with those whom one wouldn't see regularly regardless[1] - sort of a low-level relationship keepalive.
- People post introspections or anecdotes (or, very rarely, memes) which tell me things about them I'd never have thought to ask, and which wouldn't be likely to come up anytime (except perhaps for those strangely close 3 AM conversations).
- LJ provides fodder for discussion with friends whom one does see regularly.
- LJ posts provide me with conscious reminders of "hey, this person is out there!", which, if anything, makes me more likely to get together with them...they're less likely to slip the mind when I have a free evening or something.

I guess, in short: I don't see that LJ is a tool for socializing. It's a tool for keeping in touch, and learning about friends, and sharing thoughts, and (for some people) journalling. Different itch. Even IRC, which is much more about socializing, isn't a substitute for face-to-face interaction when the latter is feasible; it's simply accessible much more often than getting together is.

(Oh, and re: "more depressed" - as mentioned by previous posters, I think that's simply that people are more willing to talk about feeling down in a space which is explicitly "my journal" - a place where discussing their general emotional state is not merely acceptable but ostensibly part of the point.)

[1] = This is, incidentally, my primary motivation for being on LJ, and it works fantastically. If there's someone I see every 2 years, rather than having to spend all of our face-to-face time on recounting the broad strokes of our life to each other (which, while communication isn't really conversation), we can have actual conversations; it also helps to feel like one is continuing an acquaintance/friendship rather than trying to re-make it.

Just one note:

(Oh, and re: "more depressed" - as mentioned by previous posters, I think that's simply that people are more willing to talk about feeling down in a space which is explicitly "my journal" - a place where discussing their general emotional state is not merely acceptable but ostensibly part of the point.)

Actually, I'm not talking about online in that particular respect -- I mean that a surprising number of my friends seem more down *in person* than they used to. There are many possible causes, of course, but I'm fairly sure the trend is real...

My experience is that LJ can somewhat weaken local interactions, but it strengthens long-distance ones and connects me with people I would never have met otherwise. Email had this effect before LJ, though one-to-one communication builds more slowly than the many-to-many of LJ. (While mailing lists are also many-to-many, very few achieve the level of personal knowledge and interaction that LJ does.)

I said LJ somewhat weakens local interactions. Let me refine that: it especially weakens local interactions among a mixed group (some on LJ and some not). Just as I wince when filkers or SCA folks or coworkers start going off about things that are only relevant in that context while conversing in a larger group, I get frustrated when people do that with respect to LJ. Yeah, you posted about it; maybe half of us had access at all, and half of those skimmed it, and half of those read it carefully. To either assume everyone has the context or to assume that no one wants to hear it because you already posted is a mistake, IMO. (Lest there be any doubt, this is a generic, indefinite "you".)

Let me give you one example of the non-local phenomenon. This was actually email, not LJ, but it's the same principle in this case. The formative years of my religious exploration would not have happened had a then-acquaintance not made an off-hand remark on a mailing list that led me to send private email with a question. That started a very long, complex, and enriching conversation which I treasure and still reread from time to time. Did I know anyone locally who could have filled such a role in person? Maybe. Would we have actually had such a conversation, synchronously and interactively? I very much doubt it. I am much better at both expressing myself and processing others' words with written media, preferably asynchronous. If I were going through such explorations today, you can bet I'd be using my LJ to work it out (though probably under a lock).

As for the folks I never would have interacted with at all... I've never met half my reading list, and several of the ones I have met have been as a result of LJ. Maybe we would have found each other (or functionally-equivalent others) via other means, maybe not. I can't speak to how many people I'm not interacting with on mailing lists because I'm spending more time on LJ. But I am quite confident that these newfound conversational partners are not displacing in-person socializing.

Interesting discussion of tools for making conversations the social construction of choice:
http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/03/29/how-i-use-rss-to-make-my-life-easier/

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The genuinely *social* media app

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

The genuinely social media app