Ponderings on Connectivity

Miseristhenes the Socialmediaite

This is part V of my all the things(!!!) blog series where I attempt to make sense of all the things I've gotten myself into these past 5-10 years, and I figure out how to Marie Kondo my professional hobbies.  

In this post, I turn my attention to social media! The topic that connects us, and divides us, and has gotten the "it's complicated" label since Elon Musk bought and fucked up the Twitter sandbox. Yes, while Twitter still eXists, the busting up of Twitter, and the rendering of it useless, has created a bit of an interesting dilemma and has fostered a working reality that is just rather f*cking tiring 🙄.

But first thing's first, let's take a step back and examine the current state a bit. A few colleagues and I started pulling some strings and looking at our digital identities and networks in Lines of Flight: The Digital Fragmenting of Educational Networks. I think a lot more work can be done in this domain, especially during this time of big disruptions, and many more articles can be researched and written about the current disruption. I am not sure if I have the energy to work on another article (see all the things, part III), but I'd be happy to collaborate with folks who have an interesting angle to research.

Anyway, back to my train of thought: This is a unique time (IMO) because of the conditions and expectations associated with life online. I've tentatively defined three eras of the social web.  

The first era I call the emergent era and it coincides with Web 2.0 and the Read-Write Web (starting ca. 2002ish - give or take 2-3 years). In the first era, social networks didn't exist in the way we think of them now. Social Networking Sites (SNS), like MySpace and Friendster, emerged around that time, and they weren't alone.  There was a plethora of SNS that emerged around this time, from generalist to more interest-based related SNS.  These were experimental and folks had not built their social identities (and networks) just yet. Both the SNS and users were trying to figure this kind of stuff out, and folks were most likely innovators and early adopters at this phase. The later parts of this era neighbored the early majority kinds of users. I am thinking here in terms of diffusion of innovation phases. I'd say that a big focus of this era was experimentation and to some extent discovery of like-minded geeks in these spaces. Networks were small and everyone started out with the few individuals that they already had in their addressbooks.

The second era is the one that just ended in 2022 with Twitter's takeover; give or take 2-3 years as Twitter is still around and a rolling dumpster fire. During this era, we saw a lot of consolidation among the platforms, with some platforms shutting their doors. While platforms are consolidating or dying, additional users are being onboarded to the services that emerge victorious. Here we see early majority and late majority style of users, with some of the early majority perhaps rising to the rank of influencers (still hate this term...🙄). Through this contraction and focus on a smaller number of popular SNS, users coalesced in a few of them.  It is during this time that we see the formation and development of various communities, using platform-specific tools; like Google+'s circles and Twitterchats using hashtags. I'd say that a big focus during this era was network-building, and a major part of this network-building was joining existing spaces and conversations.

The third era that we find ourselves in these days is the era of The Great Disruption. Like the emergent era we now have a lot more services to pick from. Some SNS are new, like Bluesky and Threads, others gained a bit more traction, like Mastodon, and the dust was blown off some emergent era SNS, like LinkedIn, and started to be repurposed. There is a bit of a double-lift in this era: We are experimenting with many more sites and we're trying to rebuild our network without knowing where that network is going to end up. In fact, the great disruption is more like a great fragmentation because people are all over the place.  Some people are joining all the sites (hey, that's me!🙋‍♂️), and some people are joining some, and some have exited altogether (although there are few of those in my network, or so it seems). I've started to maintain a presence on multiple SNS and cross-post. This is done for both personal profiles, as well as business-oriented profiles that I maintain for work, because I don't know where the audience is, or where it's headed to. 

Trying to make sure that I connect with relevant people from my past Twitter profile(s) is more work than it needs to be. Network fragmentation means more work to be connected and be part of conversations - if those conversations are even taking place anywhere! The second era was really about discovery for me, and even before the muskification of Twitter I was discovering new interesting people to follow and engage with. This current era is about figuring out where people are (if anywhere) rather than building upon what existed. It's a job just to maintain contact with the existing crew!  I can't really say a ton about work-related social profiles because it always was a small percentage of my work time (which has increased because of the fragmentation, btw!🙄), but I've noticed that my own professional/personal social media activity is less about conversations these days and more about liking/resharing things on my feed, which can lead to useless endless scrolling...

Before the muskification of Twitter, the network had been built-up over the preceding decade. There were established Twitter chats, and folks had formed their social networks. There were interesting discussion topics that you could lurk on and then join in. Having a mature network means that you don't have to work too hard to find and join conversations, they exist and you gain access to them by seeing them in your feed (say what you will about algorithmic feeds, but they have their utility).  Attempting to maintain a presence across the diaspora of SNS these days feels like a job that pays no dividends (not to mention that in addition to no benefit, it sometimes feels exhausting).  Now, I am sure that if I didn't have all the things (see previous posts in this series), this may have been OK, but what worked and go us through COVID (as far as social media goes), now seems completely busted and in need of a major overhaul, which feel like a job 😂

Thoughts? How have folks navigated the coming of the current era of social media (beyond cross-posting)? 🤔