It's definitely changed and it happened slowly so we didn't notice at first. In the 90s and the early aughts the social fabric of the Internet was comprised of a number of small communities, each of which had a distinct membership and culture.
By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which gets visited by billions of people, and your friends all hang out around one ride but so do a thousand other randoms. You'd have to be a PR spokesperson to look at that and call it a community.
All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.
Reddit is the only one that hearkens back to the old days a bit -- each community has local moderators and a somewhat distinct culture, but the corporate overlord is still there sanitizing, monetizing, and occasionally messing with people's posts.
I think the language issue is especially interesting, did we fail to recognize that our communities were dying because we lack a word for the thing that supplanted them?
> All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.
That is an amazingly good point - its very easy to be lost and lonely in a crowd.
Mayhaps not perfectly applicable, but your last line reminded me of this:
> Sheridan: Once during the war, my fighter was disabled. I sat there, radio out, power out, for eight hours, which seemed like eight years. I didn't think I'd ever see another living being. Well, I was rescued, obviously, but.. I'll never forget that.. feeling of helplessness. I, I never thought there could be anything worse than being all alone in the night.
> Delenn: But there is. Being all alone in a crowd. You feel cut off from your people, from your government. You even begin to doubt yourself. I understand it so well, that it cuts to my heart.
By the 2010's the big players had come along and supplanted these Internet communities. Facebook talks all the time about its "community" but it's more like a theme park which gets visited by billions of people, and your friends all hang out around one ride but so do a thousand other randoms. You'd have to be a PR spokesperson to look at that and call it a community.
All the big social networks employ this model of throwing everyone into the same arena but humans aren't wired to feel at home in that environment, so we get all these weird side effects like social media causing depression, loneliness, and the angst expressed by this writer.
Reddit is the only one that hearkens back to the old days a bit -- each community has local moderators and a somewhat distinct culture, but the corporate overlord is still there sanitizing, monetizing, and occasionally messing with people's posts.
I think the language issue is especially interesting, did we fail to recognize that our communities were dying because we lack a word for the thing that supplanted them?