Strangerships are the future of social media
Look at your facebook or instagram feed. Oh more happy couple pictures, gym #humblebrags, selfies, more self-exaltation, more socially-agreeable “safe” statuses and politically correct expressions. For the promise of connecting more people together, social media is really bad at connecting people beyond the superficiality of being associated graphically, and at facilitating deeper interactions that create trust and relationship-building processes. It’s really just an impression of connectedness when actually very little of that exists.
I would meet people I know on facebook in the elevator and have absolutely nothing to say.
We rarely say what we really feel on social media. There’s this constant glare of being judged and a fear of social isolation when expressing socially disagreeable thoughts and opinions. In contrast, fessup seeks to exploit anonymity to create a social environment that allows for truer, more honest self-disclosure. This is known as the Online Disinhibition Effect. With increasing depth and breadth of self-disclosure, we hope this increases the strength of relationships as they grow into Strangerships, as posited by the Social Penetration theory.
Facebook’s great for maintaining strong ties with close friends and family, not so great with the discovery and maintenance of weak ties with loosely connected people in an individual’s community, whether it is a part of a school, a field of work, or civic society in general.
Strong ties are links between friends and family, typically people who already know each other before they add each other on social networks like Facebook/Snapchat. fessup is more about weak ties, for knowing what/who else is out there in the expanse of larger communities.
I have actually jettisoned some old frenemies to be replaced by new people on this fessup journey, and a few of them are people I met on fessup itself — 2 actually — which is huge seeing as how we only had the means to penetrate mainstream visibility with our iOS release two months ago.
Strangerships will be a substantive if not transformative layer to existing social media.
Announcing chatrooms on fessup
You will need an authenticated status to enter a chatroom (for now), such as an @ox.ac.uk account or @e.ntu.edu.sg account.
Kind of like how IRC was, but optimized for the modern mobile ecosystem everyone’s familiar with. Yuck:
