30 minutes with a stranger

I wonder how much of this is due to social media sites and how the choice to interact that way (where the medium is geared to show off shallow facets of our achievements or amplify polarized opinions) is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.

> is robbing us from traditional ways of spending time together.

The assumption that social-media applications are really social is robbing us of traditional ways of maintaining actual society.

True. It's so hard nowadays to go out with a friend to grab a beer or a coffee. They don't feel the urge because they satisfy social interactions online, and they think it's enough. Well, it's undoubtedly simpler that way, but it's fake.

I, personally, hate chatting through instant messengers. I lost many connections because people started moving online more and more, and I just couldn't handle that anymore. For example, I don't like interrupting what I'm doing, and people usually expect to get a response within minutes. Plus, when I don't respond immediately, I simply forget and remind myself a month later. I could be the problem too, but the way we do communication today doesn't help either.

This predates social media. Bowling Alone was first written back in '95.

Isolating tech goes earlier than that.

I know all my neighbours in my block who walk, cycle, or take the bus. Repeated interactions. The ones who take the elevator to the basement car park are the ones I never cross paths with.

its the most fuzzy definition ever. the literal sense of social media would mean "mediums of socialising" like instant messengers or forums, but it actually covers pretty much any website or app with a messaging feature. it basically just means "the internet" to idiots

id like to point out that youre on social media right now.

That's what I was thinking, if social media was not there, would we be more social? Or is it really the fact that our necessities can be covered without being social the real "problem".

I think your ordering is wrong, we don't need to spend time together anymore so we fall back to social media. I wonder how things would look like if we had social media on top of a more social world.

There used to be social networks. You'd tell the computer who you knew in real life and you could talk to them through the computer.

Then it was social media. People could publish things and their friends would see what they did in a single feed. Like TV or radio media, it pushes info to you, about your friends.

Lastly it was just media. It was the same feed pushing stuff to you, but it isn't your friends any more. It's unknown micro-celebrities, ads, whatever keeps audiences hooked and makes profit for the company. Tiktok exemplifies this but they've all done it now.

The next step will be removing humans from the loop entirely, a feed of personalized AI generated slop engineered to keep you staring at it.

YouTube and Facebook are almost turning into this organically. YouTube seems to be trying to fight it. Zuck seems to just not care anymore, generally. Eventually one will fully embrace it.

Are there even any social networks anymore? Oddly enough as weird and cringe as it is I think LinkedIn kind of qualifies. It’s business but that’s a form of social interaction that involves real people doing stuff.

I think most social interaction has moved onto messengers, Discord, Slack, etc.

There's an Outer Limits episode about this: https://breezewiki.com/theouterlimits/wiki/The_Haven

Season 5, Episode 15 (1999)

I expect the latter. Social media isn't social in any meaningful sense. It is more like an interactive diary or interactive television. Any human involvement behind the scenes is merely an implementation detail — and with the way AI is going, an implementation detail that may not even remain for much longer. Social media may reduce overall social interaction, but only in the same way that reading books reduced social interaction. There is only so much time in the day; but that doesn't make all uses of time equivalent.

> Are there even any social networks anymore?

Mastodon?