Where have all the postings gone… long time passing…

So, forgive me if this is a dumb question, but where did everyone go?

A forced change to livejournal (friend’s page no longer accepts custom styles) has pushed me to go to each of the friends that I follow and resubscribe to their individual pages.

And I keep seeing a wasteland. So many last updates that say things like ‘2010’, ‘2009’, ‘2007’. Where did everyone go? I see posts from the same dozen people on a regular basis, but there used to be a lot more people out there.

So where did everyone go?

I know about Twitter. I’m there, but the posts are short and stream by. Don’t get me started about Facebook. The drek drowns out the good stuff all too often. And too much is stuffed onto one page. Tumblr? Pinterest? Pretty, but mostly empty from what I’ve seen.

Where do people go to actually…. write? Journal to their social network? Connect?

And I know, for the longest time I’ve written on my own wordpress blog and crossposted to LJ (and now… FB too. Not that I go there myself). So I’m one of those people who is ‘not there’ in some sense.

I accept that my social life isn’t what it was. But looking at the data while redoing the LJ connections… man, it really isn’t what it used to be. And a lot of it used to be keeping connected to people on LJ in a way that I just don’t feel connected on other network sites. And these days I’m not feeling connected to many people at all. So here I send out a post into what seems to be an ever fading arena, knowing that the dozens of people who haven’t updated in five years aren’t going to see it, just as I don’t see anything from them.

Part of me wonders when a social network connection is so underutilized that it should be pruned entirely. I’ve readded these dead connections. IT doesn’t cost me much at all. No posts means nothing shows up in my feeds. No words require me to triage their value and exert neurons to process them. And if someone does come back, the connection is still there. But perhaps there is an unseen, unknown weight and drag from these old connections.

I feel like I’ve missed some secret. That all these connections have been moved somewhere else, and I’m the one who wasn’t told about it, or doesn’t know how to get to them. Is there some way to make Facebook functional? Or have people given up on the concept of social networks entirely? Did people move to some site that died or never thrived (xanga, myspace, Google+) and then never have the heart to try again? I know, again, I’m asking this of the wrong audience, because the only audience that will see it is almost definitionally the wrong one. Am I echolocating across a featureless plain? Only getting back what I already know to be there?

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Chad

I'm just this guy, you know?

2 thoughts on “Where have all the postings gone… long time passing…”

  1. I’ve been feeling similarly about the digital landscape recently. Since I left Facebook entirely, I’ve sometimes wondered if there is just a rollicking party there that I am no longer privy to. That said, I also think that a lot of people, especially the tweeners–people who didn’t get to the social media party late so aren’t still finding it a novelty, and yet aren’t exactly young and full enough of energy have become dulled to social media, either drifting away in favor of offline pursuits or slipping into passivity. Even online gamers seem to have become closed off there where they are actively engaged rather than on a more passive social networking site.

    Some of this, too, is coming as someone who moved away from where most of my friends live in the offline world and therefore came to rely on the internet to stay in touch…and then saw people just stop showing up (as well as being someone who just stopped showing up at some fora).

    Personally I adore twitter, which is where I have moved my sharing of links, etc. I also use it to stay up on news, both professional and otherwise, and I like the short-form. But I also suspect that it has helped contribute to the fast-paced and short-form of most online interaction in favor of something longer like Livejournal. I have tried to keep up writing on my own blog, but since I moved away from Livejournal (where I never had much of a flourishing network to begin with), I never saw much point in cross-posting there.

    Bigger point, though, long-form writing seems to be a throw-back. I understand where you’re coming from, though, and it is honestly a bit lonely out here in the wasteland, with just a few of us survivors. Nice use of the Kingston Trio/Pete Seeger lyrics, though.

    1. Yes, twitter is my other social network of choice, because it does the small talk frictionlessly. And by focusing in on that it doesn’t assault me with ads or games or photo galleries or tons of other things Facebook has stuffed into its attic. I mean, some of those options are available in Twitter, but not in an in your face way.

      And crossposting: if it is work at all people won’t do it. And none of the social networks have an incentive to make it easy to do. I probably wouldn’t if WordPress didn’t make it easy to do with plugins.

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