Reposting from my Tumblr

[atalantapendrag]

Can't Stop the Signal

When I mess around on Tumblr I can see elements of 4chan and Twitter. It’s like watching something evolve, seeing family resemblances, I don’t know quite where I’m going with this but it’s fascinating.

I have my cheap, no-data-plan not-a-smartphone set up so I can text a post to Tumblr. I can even add a picture, although the camera on the phone isn’t very good. I have Tumblr set up to automatically tweet my posts (although I can disable that when posting directly). In theory, I could have my tweets collected periodically and posted to LJ and/or Dreamwidth as well.

Something is taking form here, but I’m not sure what. And of course I’m ignoring Google+, Facebook, Blogger, and a bunch more sites I don’t use.

I follow a lot of blogs on RSS feeds on Dreamwidth. I have a big friendslist on LJ. I spend increasing amounts of time on Tumblr, and Twitter is constant background noise. I have this amazing relationship with INFORMATION, and I don’t just receive. Most of it is reflection and static, but I’m transmitting. I don’t get out much, don’t have many face-to-face conversations. But I talk to people online (directly or by posting), and I get responses, and sometimes, people share what I say with others.

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this. Mostly getting thoughts out of my head. I wish I had a therapist, and specifically one I could show this to and expect an intelligent reaction and some insight. But I have you, internets. Any interesting information in my static? How much of this will you reflect, and what will you add?

Comments

The Internet Connection (yeah, I went there!)

[sathari]

The internet has definitely changed information-sharing--- I don't know if this is actually true, but I feel like one "thing" for me is that even in my offline life, I am more likely to respond to people based on the quality of their thoughts and their self-expression rather than the type of data we don't immediately get online (like gender, age, race/ethnicity); I tend to recognize people as being "like me" or "possible friends" more based on stuff they say rather than how they look, because that's how I've made friends online. (I'm sure that I am in fact more affected by those other cues than I'm aware of, mind!) And also that one of the other "cool things" about online communication is that you can often re-read what someone has said, check for nuances--- and for that matter, check that your own replies are congruent.

But that's sort of "microsystem" stuff, the way that I'm relating to people in my close circles, as opposed to that wider dissemination. But the shape of information-sharing has definitely changed, and I think it's not that we necessarily have less information than we used to, but rather that the shape of the information shared is different and we're adjusting? We share information in all kinds of ways, and the overall shape of what we share has its own messages at a level underneath what we think we're sharing in a given moment. And that's true face to face and online and in any kind of interaction.

Re: The Internet Connection (yeah, I went there!)

[atalantapendrag]

Oh, definitely a change in the shape and not the quantity of information; the brain can only process so much. And when you spend as much time online as someone like me does, you're filtering the world through your choice of lens in a way that just isn't possible offline. But I'm a rather extreme example.

Re: The Internet Connection (yeah, I went there!)

[sathari]

True that you're filtering it through your choice of lens; I think that in the past the equivalent filter was essentially geographic, though: that we were limited to people who were geographically close to us in terms of our perceptions, which is a different shape of skew but not necessarily a less narrow one.