Tedium - The Social Circle ⭕️

(PPD/pixnio)

The “second family”: The power of the social circle

The year was 2006. I was about two years out of college, and I had been fairly transient since I graduated. I lived in different cities and had different experiences, while working in an industry I really liked (though one that would always struggle to love me back). I had just moved into my fourth city since August of 2004.

Personally, I was not in the best of places. I had given up most of my belongings to support this more transient, minimalist lifestyle, and there was even a period in there where I didn’t have a working computer. I had a bad roommate situation and was, for a time, living in temporary housing while I was waiting to move in with a co-worker.

I remember, vividly, being stuck without a laptop, watching the final four episodes of Arrested Development, my favorite show, on a TV set in a hotel room during the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics. That was what brought me joy at the time.

So, in a way, I had my “time in the wilderness.” I could access certain things at work, but for the most part I had a brief, computer-free period where I didn’t really have much in the way of social circles outside of the group of people I worked with, also largely transients who had moved to town from elsewhere.

(Rod Long/Unsplash)

But then I moved to another town, and found my people. I would go to a coffee shop every day and find camaraderie with folks there. I met some of my best friends at this coffee shop. And suddenly, my social circle began to widen to the point where I was out and about basically every single weekend, taking a trip or going to a karaoke bar or even just wandering around the neighborhood or rocking out to music.

This in-real-life social circle did a good job looking out for one another back then, but then a lot of us ended up moving away—including me. Life moved on. I liked the idea of living in that town forever, but then I moved away, but with a better sense of social skills that I learned from being a very social person for a little while. And our social situations changed. I met my future wife, other friends got married and had kids, others transitioned out of jobs, others stayed put.

It’s that same gradual thing with a lot of interactions. Some people stay friends for life with people they met in college; others don’t bother going to the reunions. Some people do a lot of networking or travel; others stick close to their family.

I’m still good friends with many of those people I met during this time frame today. Recently we’ve been doing movie nights in our yard—and for the last one we did, at least half a dozen people showed up that I’ve known for at least 15 years.

They always say that, when done well, friends develop into your second family. Time constraints aside, I think I did pretty well on that front.

And I think I’ve carried the lessons from that time in my life with me ever since.

But what I find interesting is what happens when you apply this thought process to the digital world. And yes, it does apply.

Twitter, very accidentally, became all things to all people who logged in, because it was simple, free, and largely unfiltered. No two people had the exact same experience on Twitter in its original form. Sure, we didn’t think as deeply about the things that we said, and the discourse could be a bit mind-numbing. But I think it’s the kind of place where, if you really commit to it, you can find strong, lasting communities of people much like you can if you commit to going to a coffee shop every single day of the week.

But the chain rattlers that exist to chain rattle are usually better at this whole social media thing than you or I, and I think as a result they carry undue influence over the whole thing. They are the ones who are willing to self-immolate on a toxic take because of the 1 percent chance that it will help make them more successful. They understand that more attention is always better than no attention, no matter where it comes from.

These people are professional griefers, people who are more obsessed with image or ideology than communication. And that’s why they are so dangerous, because they are willing to keep self-immolating until they can execute self-immolation without getting burned.

I think that’s the part about Elon that bugs me the most. It’s not that someone bought Twitter, but that he bought it seemingly for the sake of the people who rattle the chains, who make a tiny minority of the users but a majority of the hot air. The first person he interacted with on Twitter after the sale was finalized is telling.

But that’s not what Twitter is, or what it excels at. Twitter is best when it is everything to everyone, where it is the coffee shop, and the bar, and the stand-up gig, and the trade show, and the theme park. It needs legitimate controls to ensure that everyone can take part, but if it has those controls and they’re managed well, it can work for nearly everyone.

(Ravi Sharma/Unsplash)

And that’s why the journey to find a new Twitter, the coffee shop/maker space/bar/bonfire that isn’t just about politics or sharing links, seems like it might be really difficult. There is literally nothing like it on the entire internet. Oh sure, there are things that are close. Mastodon, for example, feels like a good start, but there are genuine concerns that people have with the idea of decentralized networking, a desire to see someone in charge to help manage legitimate trust and safety issues.

I think networks like Slack and Discord have elements that could lend themselves to a Twitter style feed if organized slightly differently. If one of these networks does lean that way, it may actually be easier to pull off than if Twitter were to adjust its network to work more like Slack or Discord. The hard part is all the engineering and the work to convince communities that This. Is. The Way. The easy part is the feed itself.

Maybe the network that emerges as the new watering hole will be something old, like Tumblr. Maybe it’ll be something new and untested, like Cohost or Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky. Maybe Elon won’t screw it up, though plenty of people, myself included, aren’t convinced.

Or maybe we won’t find a Twitter-sized watering hole, one big enough for all of us, with differing personalities, qualities, capabilities, and sense of humor. Maybe this was a temporary social experiment to see if we all could be thrown in the same place with only our thoughts and a word limit, and how we would engage and interact with society.

I think the big lesson we learned is that the margins will always ruin the good parts of what made something fun. That’s not a fun lesson, but I would like to suggest that you don’t focus on the chaos in the margins. If you’re a Twitter user, think about what you gained from the whole thing.

--

Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal!

And thanks to Atlas.co for sponsoring. Check out their awesome maps!