Change is coming, and that right soon.
The internet age came on faster than society could create norms for using it.
The general public seems to be finally, if belatedly, coming to some terms with screens, the internet, and virtual lives. We were already feeling the bad effects of a life lived too much in the web, but in the past few weeks the Facebook scandal cluster has marked now as the beginning of the end of the freewheeling social media age.
Facebook won’t like the coming changes. The judgement needlework still from The Shawshank Redemption is for them. The Facebook using public is…not pleased. I do not know if the platform will completely die out, but I do expect it to become less useful because fewer people want to be there. See
’s “It’s Not Because of a Data Breach.” That not wanting to be there, leaving, and then not missing it might spill over onto other platforms, making them a little less useful. (Twitter, I’m looking at you.)For the moment, however, lots of people are hesitating about a complete break because while society was trying to keep up with the social media age many forgot — or never learned — how to do some stuff the old way.
Actually, for a while I’ve expected that fortysomethings would have to do some heavy cultural knowledge lifting on this point. We know how things can be done without internet tech but we are savvy enough with the tech that we can translate the concepts. Think things like organizing community groups. If I’ve seen one, I’ve seen half a dozen articles referring to people worried about leaving Facebook because how would they organize such things without it? Well, for one, PaperlessPost has a Flyer option in Beta that would work pretty well.
Of course, there is a catch, two really.
To leave social media behind we will need to use email again and go back to visiting individual websites, rather than relying on automated feeds.
Signs of both trends have been around for a while. Email never really died. It fell out of use with some segments, mostly the young, and so it didn’t improve much. Thankfully there are ways to make it better.
Toward this end, I moved the Sunday collection of curated commentary to our own email account a few weeks back. If email is sticking around, I wanted ours more functional and easier on the eyes. I am pleased with the results. Last week’s dispatch, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” discussed a few other Facebook and real life angles. If you’ve missed your Sunday brunch reading, sign up here. (This letter is going out in lieu of this Sunday’s Collection as it is Passover and Easter.)
The return to using individual sites will take a little longer for people to readapt. And I’m kicking myself, but two years ago, I tried to keep my old blog alive and wrote about a blog as a personal address, like mobile phone numbers have now become personal numbers. Remember, only 20 years ago, a phone number was tied to where you lived. Now area codes merely tell where you were living when you got your first phone, because your original phone number sticks with you even when you switch services. Ditto for email, actually. It used to change with your job or your phone service. Now a gmail, icloud, or yahoo account stays with you. I thought old personal websites would be like that and we could use them as a hub though which everything else would flow.
Turns out I was pretty good on the prediction but way off on the timing. None of the changes I anticipated happened three years ago. They are starting to happen now. So I’m scrambling to re-build what I neglected when I lost faith in my predictions.
But it can all be done. Taking what we know now and applying it to old ways, I think we will be pleased with the results. (
, we should chat at some point in the not too distant future.) Frankly, I was better informed when I made my own reading routine than when I moved to the convenient social media feeds or even RSS services like Feedly. I was more content when I had a small network of commenters in the virtual world and neighbors in real life with whom my conversations were private. And privacy, there is much to be said about the value of privacy. I don’t mean protecting data, although there is that. I mean the problem of oversharing.The transition will take time. I have some How-to explainers in the works, but with an eye to adding improvements to the old, sturdy frameworks. I see no reason to throw out all of the new just because gourging ourselves on it ended badly. Moderation. It’s a good thing.
For the moment, however, it is family time. Until next week.
Leslie
