When the flames rise around us and I can’t see the door
This is still my home and it has never burned before
This is where I’ve taken my solace and my peace
The walls are caving in but I am still a stubborn beast.Jolie Holland. “Stubborn Beast.” Springtime Can Kill You.
I have decided that I do not like so-called social software. It has been building for a while now, but it has almost reached critical mass for me.
Now, please do not misunderstand me, social software can be extremely useful. It has been (and still is) useful to me. If I thought it was totally useless I would have pulled my Flickr, Facebook and MySpace accounts.
But I (and I have no doubt many of the “kids” out there not quite geeky enough to be one of the new cool kids) really didn’t need another reminder of the fact that I am occasionally “tolerated.”
Like I said to someone the other night, “It is always complicated.” Heck, I’m not even breaking up with someone and I’m still confused about how to handle this problem.
[And, no, jdm, this has nothing to do with you. Just a useful quotation.]
6 responses so far ↓
1 Jenn // Dec 11, 2006 at 11:38 pm
Careful! Richard will start wondering what I’m talking about with you.
2 Mark // Dec 12, 2006 at 8:52 am
Tell him not to worry. It was only “spin the bottle.” And he was there.
And while I can’t answer for Richard’s capacity for wonderment, I would never remotely consider myself “competition” of any kind. [btw, that comment is about Richard and me, not you.]
3 ranger // Dec 12, 2006 at 9:46 am
Hmm, isn’t blogging using “social software”? I get great delight from reading your musings, and seeing your flickr pics, etc.
4 Mark // Dec 12, 2006 at 10:09 am
Dang! I knew someone was going to bring up blogging.
I thought about including it originally, but I just don’t think of blogging as social in the same sense. Probably just me drawing arbitrary lines.
Thanks, and I often feel delighted in the same way.
But, yes, maybe I should’ve included blogging. I guess I think of blog reading and commenting as the social part. If you just blog and no one reads or comments, then is it social? But people do read, and clearly they comment, so I should have included it.
And now that I think about it a bit more, there have been a few instances of reading blogs lately that have been painful in the same way as the other software I included.
I’m sorry to all for being so vague, but I am really trying not to hurt anybody’s feeling. This probably has more to do with me than anyone else (although, again, I have no doubt that others are affected in similar ways).
I guess at the bottom of things, I am saying that social software is (can be) simply another tool to reinforce/demonstrate social standing/acceptance.
And again, it can be much more than that, too. It can be a great way to stay in touch with people who aren’t nearby. It can be a great way to share photos and so forth. So, no, I have not closed any of my accounts.
Probably should’ve included IM, too. But I don’t think of it in the same way. Certainly it has a social component to it for me, but not in the same way as the others. It is unlikely that IM will (as easily) demonstrate all the things you did not get invited to in the same way as blogs, Flickr, Facebook or MySpace (and others I don’t use).
Thanks for your comment ranger.
btw, “soul searching” is a very difficult thing, isn’t it my friend?
5 Richard // Dec 12, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Hey! That’s my line! And my, it’s getting social in here. Now you have me curious about what’s going on (online that is).
I found that I still mostly stay in touch with people the old fashioned way - via e-mail. I am not in the habit of regularly checking the several social networking sites I belong too. I feel very cuspy about this, esp. when I see the statistics about the decline of e-mail, the rise of txt and social sites. And its not that I’m averse to them, I just haven’t found a way to use them. It seems like it takes two to tango and I haven’t made much of an effort to find people who are only netfriends.
6 Mark // Dec 13, 2006 at 8:46 am
Hi Richard,
I, too mostly stay in touch with folks the way you do. While there is way too much email in the world due to mailing lists and spammers, I do not equate those problems with the need to kill email entirely.
Having a birthday on the 20th I understand the cuspy thing very well. I got into MySpace because my son–who I had not spoken to for over a year–invited me in. I figured if he could be big enough of a man to invite some form of communication then I could be man enough to accept. On that account, I am extremely thankful I did.
For a long time, I didn’t even think of Flickr as social but just as somewhere to stick my photos after getting a digital camera. Over time, as I have added friends and contacts and have included pics of social events and shared those with others, I have decided that it certainly *can* be social.
I, too, don’t make a lot of use of some of these, esp. Facebook and MySpace, because I also haven’t quite found a way to make them useful.
All in all, right now my concerns (for me personally) are not about those aspects. While those are still (small?) issues, they are not what I’m griping about here.
My gripe is certainly no major insight, and most anyone with any sense could predict it. But I have come to see them as little more than another way to enforce cliquishness and belonging/non-belonging. Much more publicly.
That is not progress in my mind.