On the topic of sites which barely appeal to me

There exist a few gargantuan time-wasting and mind-numbing web sites that scoop up hours of attention like a whale does krill. Facebook, with its coterie of applications (like Farmville and Mafia Wars, though I fear my lack of experience here is showing), is the undisputed king, but Twitter also looms large. The carcasses of others, like MySpace or Friendster, twist far off in their wake, drifting slowly down on gentle currents that carry them deeper into obscurity. Others, like LinkedIn and Xing, survive in their specialized niches, saved from extinction for now.

Otherwise fastidiously scholarly people seem to get sucked in to the cycle of constantly checking for signs of digital attention and acceptance. For example, in the post Why I Quit Facebook by Justin E.H. Smith, a professor of philosophy and language writes:

“By 2010 I had an iPhone, and I had taken to checking for likes every minute or so while walking down the street; I learned even to check for them, surreptitiously, while teaching.”

Such an invasive insinuation into daily life was first made possible by SmartPhones, which deliver email and text messages announcing every ripple in the pond formed by the intricate network of relationships defined by one’s profile and friendships. This stream of data could be termed distracting, but that assumes that people are doing something important from which they are being distracted. Can we honestly worry about a loss of creativity and philosophy and thought when nothing of the sort was going to happen, with or without a constant stream of notifications delivered to a personal mobile device? These devices chirp the arrival of each message, reminding their owners that something is going on that might interest them, just in case that which is happening in the immediate environs should happen to be subpar, as it usually is. Each soft ping represents a glimmer of hope that ennui may be fought back, if only for a little while.

Since this seems to be such a lucrative gravy train, there will regularly be new contenders looking to at least carve out a modicum of success, if not to unseat the established kings of socialization online. The post, How Storify And Pinterest Are Cultivating The Wild Web, And Why Social Media Will Civilize The Internet by Eric Kain (Forbes) discusses two of these.

I took a not-exactly-overwhelmingly-excited look:

• PInterest: Shopping? Breadcrumbs of social media? Pictures that people like? It’s a sheer sensory overload that promises hours of labyrinths through which an otherwise unengaged consciousness can wander.
• Storify: A cavalcade of tweet-like snippets of thought? This site also purports to offer curated thought, but curated by whom? And the length of content makes the Huffington Post seem like a paragon of long-form writing.

After reading the article, I feel that the title “A Bit Fat Pile of Fatuous Bullshit by Erik Kain” would have been more accurate but, as you can see from the title he chose, Kain thinks that these sites are going to be essential to how people socialize online. It seems like hype, but I think I’ve provided ample evidence that I don’t really have my finger on the pulse of humanity. I fear I will constantly underestimate both how much leisure time people have to fill and the paucity of ideas that they have for doing so. That’s not to say that I don’t partake in socialization online; I do. I was an occasional contributor to both Slashdot and Plastic and enjoyed much back-and-forth in the comments on both of those sites. More recently, I’ve been a regular commenter on Reddit, where conversations are also largely conducted anonymously. My experiences there have resulted in more rewarding conversations with strangers than with my so-called friends on Facebook, where any conversation of merit or substance quickly peters out.

I was going to name this post, “On the topic of sites whose purpose I cannot construe”, but that would have been inaccurate: I know that these kinds of sites are created primarily because their creators want to make money. There are some sites which are created because their authors want that functionality for themselves, but it’s hard to see that behind some of the latest attention-magnets like pInterest and Storify. In either case, all of these sites must capture attention in order to work as designed and in order to survive. Funding likely comes from advertising tie-in deals and delivery of captured target markets to purveyors of products. The world seems to be largely uninterested in delivering free content in any other way.

Some of these sites purport to provide some form of service (“curated content!”), but it’s an ephemeral one, perhaps best expressed as “eating time for you”. I next tried the title “On the topic of sites whose appeal I cannot construe”, but quickly discarded that candidate as well. The appeal is obvious; it just doesn’t appeal to me. These sites help burn away those endless hours of leisure, they keep the ennui at bay. They help some get through those horrifyingly tedious hours of idleness at work, that time when the gears of bureaucracy take so long to mesh and provide something useful (or at least distracting) to do but, at the same time, refuse to release their prey from the physical constraints of the cubicle. Smart phones, a data plan and Facebook and its ilk to the rescue!

The word addiction is thrown about casually, but it’s far too crude an epithet for this dynamic. It is an especially crude characterization for someone to use who is not—or has not been—ensnared in this net. Or for someone who has no trouble filling time with other pursuits.

From within, it all makes sense and each tweet and status update and notification-check and cat video watched and LOL scrawled beneath a fake quote pasted onto a Photoshopped image is utterly necessary, in context. The symptoms may be those of addiction, but the darkness of the word addiction implies that some sort of degradation of quality-of-life is accepted in trade. Is that the case for all of these flies in the social media web, though? Or is this the best that they can hope for, in any case? Or is there something really important going on—something wonderful and world-saving—that I’m missing? What else were these people going to do with their time? As mentioned above, can we honestly lament unresearched cures for cancer or unwritten works of scintillating brilliance, the time for which was stolen by texting an LOL attached to yet another picture of a friend’s child in a Halloween costume?