The MIT Technology Review discusses how our existing social networks aren’t exactly fostering conversations between our personal networks
“Social media treats everyone—a friend, a family member, an acquaintance—the same,” says Courtney Walsh, a lecturer in human development and family sciences at the University of Texas who consulted for Cocoon. “I would argue that what we are doing is impersonal on social media.”
– “Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect”
I wrote about this nine years ago when the late Google+ launched. That blog post posited that it was hard, if not impossible, to model your personal life into Google+ Circles.
And then it also strikes me. That I can only recollect a single group for each phase should tell me something – I really _belonged_ to only one group at a time. It tells me that groups like ‘work’ and ‘family’ and ‘cousins’ and daily commute gang’ and such are really just only contexts for interactions. You can force-create + circles for them, but they’re really freeform amoeba-like shapes, and will change. Not even snap, just thin out at points and separate into other blobs without much emotional ado. Attempts to share ‘stuff’ with them on services like + will peter out in weeks. Or days.
– Doing life in software is hard
Related reading: “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet”.