30 Days of Posts 3: On the Internet

[Picture borrowed from timkla.wordpress.com.]

Yes, yes...I know I'm two days behind now. I wholly blame myself for that. Time to catch up.

On that note, I'd originally thought of talking about distraction and how it impedes my writing work. I thought about what exactly distracted me, especially lately. Is it my ever-constant fiddling with my music collection? Is it my occasional FreeCell games? But the more I thought about it, I realized there's really only one true distraction for me: the internet.

It's weird, really. I never thought I'd get sucked in this far, and now I'm daily trying to force myself off the damn thing, especially when I really need to be writing. It wasn't like this in the past.

But let's be honest--when my family first went online in the late 90s, it was through AOL and other webservices, and we were using dial-up and the speed was slow as hell. And even into the 2000s when we finally got broadband and all the PCs in the house were connected, I didn't get distracted. Maybe it was that there were far fewer social networks out there as there are now, or at least none that I cared to join. Besides, I had a trilogy I had to write, and I holed myself up downstairs in the basement on a nightly basis. And even then, I was more focused on the writing than I was going online and looking up pointless things. I did occasionally go online in the Belfry, but usually to look up information for my writing.

That seems to be the rub, right there: Social networking.

I never used to be this bad. Back in the 90s, we had the bbs--the bulletin board site, which was set up sort of like today's Reddit tree, but without the inserted sub-items. Very linear and lifeless, and catered pretty much to specific groups and subjects. Then there was the webforum, which you still see (usually on tech sites like C/Net and the like), but are rarely used as a social spot anymore.

If I'm not mistaken, LiveJournal popped up sometime around 2002 or so, and I joined a few years later in 2004. I have a permanent account which pretty much paid itself off quite a few years ago. This is probably where I first enjoyed a social network, as I was able to connect with a lot of my friends who were not nearby, and I was also able to meet new people as well. It is sad that it seems to be dying a slow death, at least here in the US, as I've depended on it for a number of years, especially when I moved out here to SF.

I don't even remember exactly what caused the first major exodus from LJ--I think it was some Terms of Service ballyhoo--and at the time I felt it really petty that a number of people were jumping ship so quickly. At the same time, however, I noticed that a lot of these same people were also leaving or at least backing away because they'd run out of things to say on their blogs. I guess the diary aspect of blogging about your day wore thin after awhile. I remember a lot of people leaving or abandoning LJ because they just didn't have anything to say.

On the same token, however, I noticed that many of these same people were heading over to Facebook, and Twitter shortly after. Maybe it wasn't that they didn't have anything to say...more like they wanted to say something more immediate. Something off the top of their head, rather than a longer blog post. There was also more interactivity--instead of posting an entry and waiting for someone to answer, you were instead talking pseudo-realtime through short back-and-forth entries.

What's interesting about all of this is that, in the ever-changing move from one network to another, a user who wants to keep in touch really does need to have the ability to juggle multiple platforms. I came to this realization about this time last year, when I'd noticed I had all these different sites: three different sort-of-active LJs, a few inactive LJs, a Dreamwidth account, Facebook, Twitter, and a WordPress site. It was too much! I needed to pare down, and quick. I got rid of the inactive LJs, stopped using the Dreamwidth account (which I still have but don't use at present), and my remaining blogs have become subject-specific. This leaves Facebook and Twitter as the purely social sites for me.

I've soured on Facebook for various reasons--not so much because of the people on it, or the things that get posted, or the constant site changes, but the general vibe. It just feels...it's hard to describe, but it just feels very shallow, like there's not much emotion to it. Just a lot of reactive emotion but not much creativity. Which pretty much keeps me on Twitter. Twitter's like a nonstop silly game of Exquisite Corpse, where users riff off each other, comment on each other's witticisms, and generally have a lot of fun. I think that's the best part of being relegated to 140 characters--you have to think about what you're about to type, to whom, and how. I also love the fact that the hashtag is totally used for the wrong reasons--it's supposed to be a tag, but it's quite often used as sarcasm or a silly aside. And it refreshes at an alarming rate. It's addictive.

And this, my friends, is why I need to relearn how to avoid distraction!