We could also talk about Reddit, which is a corporation. Even the entity that ultimately produced by Linux distribution, Canonical, is a corporation. I don’t mean to say that all corporations are bad or of course equally bad. I do think that handing over our social lives and online communication to any one corporation is inherently problematic.

Sasta, I’m sorry about your site’s fate; one can, however, go on. I know at least one person who has broken a site/lost a password several times and has started back up anew.

The mass went one way, into a corporate embrace, and being a contrarian, I went another. After struggling with my Comicpress site, being deluged by botcomments and generally unappreciated, I lost interest and one day discovered I missed an update cycle and everything was broken.

(or as originally mistyped, +!)

Also, congrats on the book, it’s on my to-buy-when-I-have-book-money list.

I mention this not to celebrate Twitter per se (which is also a corporation) but because I think it is worth differentiating between the kinds of interactions and access different services afford. I don’t use Twitter to write palindromes. I also don’t use it to talk about what my cat ate for breakfast.

I also don’t have a cat.

Leo & Scott, you both mention the banal, and I see that having a channel for this sort of exchange on a global scale is worthwhile. But my concern is not that Grand Text Auto (which was organized around creative & academic practices) cannot accommodate the banal — it couldn’t, and I felt that at times when I thought about posting banalities — but that the shopping mall cannot accommodate the productive, non-banal discourses we had there. While I opt out of Facebook, and I’d love for others to do the same, I don’t really feel that it needs to be destroyed, just that it shouldn’t be the dominant, hegemonic, default way of having all online conversations.

Chris, I hear the “peer pressure” argument — believe me, even coming to the Web at a different time, I do. If it feels impossible to leave, I would say don’t. If you do, it might just be a temporary stunt. Instead, I would look for meaningful communities and conversations to add to your obligatory (and perhaps in some ways rewarding) social experience on that system.

Matt, I didn’t mean to overstate the free software case. Free software has bugs and complexities and can be difficult to deal with, certainly. But we (everyone — the editors of Wikipedia, the people who add to the Web) can indeed improve free software tools using the open web, while we can’t improve proprietary systems. I don’t want government regulation of Facebook or other corporate systems; I do want free and open alternatives that are beautiful, regular, pure … like tofu … and my wants are, alas, unsoothed.

But I find the emphasis on open source tools kind of offputting. Saying “You don’t have to worry about underhanded stuff if you build your tools from source on Linux” is kind of like reading the stuff in The Jungle about workers being ground into the lard and saying, “Well, you won’t have to worry about that if you raise you own pigs.” It’s true, but not helpful to most people. Just as it’s not true that anyone in the world can set up RSS in their own way — I can’t, and I’m a lot more computer-adept than most people worldwide.

So what’s that mean? Well, the government had to step in to regulate the food industry. Do we want the government regulating the ways Big Network can exploit their customers? Maybe so, although it won’t happen in the current political environment.

Seriously, why isn’t it “tofu wanter unsoothed”?

This wasn’t directed at me, but – in college. I’d been blogging in high school, but as a freshman in college, when FB just opened up to William & Mary, everyone I wanted to stay in touch with was on it. Everyone from high school, everyone at WM; all of my contemporaries in my immediate social circle. In those days (2006) not even everyone had a phone, or a knowable email account, but everyone could be found (and conversed with, and quietly admired, or quietly hated) on FB.

Since then, it’s just spread out, right? FB owned a (comparatively) broad crosssection of Americans in the 18-22 range, who began pulling in their contemporaries and younger siblings out of camaraderie, who begin pulling in parents and teachers out of concern, and sooner and later, the network just metastasizes into a Metcalfeian monster. It’s too hard to leave.

I’m looking forward to having you join us at the Bot Forum!

I must say that one thing I like about Facebook is that it created a space where users can share absolutely banal stuff. Little things that simply aren’t worth the effort of starting a blog for, like a funny thing I saw on the way to work, or whatever. (I enjoy Scott’s food pics, for example, and I especially like the descriptions- it’s like watching culinary platform diving).

I’ve created dozens of blogs for courses, departments, offices, topics, community building, and (ironically enough) only in the past 2.5 years for actually blogging, but I wouldn’t want to create a blog for the little things. And I wouldn’t expect my friends and family to follow it.

But Facebook encourages us to share this kind of minutiae, vanity, and so on. This past weekend was Kara’s and my 11th anniversary. I wouldn’t dream of blogging about it, not unless it was some epic celebration, but sharing a few choice moments created opportunities for some delightful interactions, and a sense of community among friends near and far, close and distant. Facebook encourages us to respond in the most empty ways (liking), but sometimes that’s enough.

I suspect the FB craze is ebbing, and people are rediscovering the joy of blogging, if only because they find that after all the little interactions, we still crave more substantial engagements.

I think it is telling that many people make the argument that their use of facebook is motivated by convenience. “Convenience” (ease-of-use, UX, usability, etc.) is the defining logic of most of the recent marketing for new products that define the recent media-era from the first iPod to the latest chat apps. One should buy this or that or upgrade again because the new one is even slicker and the UI hides even more complexity from the user. Lots of technical things are poorly designed but any time somebody tries to sell you something based on a notion of convenience it is worth asking if there are some things that are worth doing a slightly more difficult way, if it means retaining a bit more freedom and autonomy. Often “convenience” is merely symbolic and one is really transferring away responsibility. The problem is not the banality of cat videos but that people are so conformist that they can only exchange these human sentiments when and where a large corporation tells them it’s ok.

I would also question the argument that one goes to facebook for a bigger audience. This is, again, the logic of marketing. With this line of thinking, it’s as if the internet were not a place of discourse but a marketplace for promotional messages. By looking for the biggest audience, we are not people having a very interesting conversation and contributing to a discourse. No, we are free agents competing for “ratings”, “eyeballs” or “mindshare” in a zero-sum game.

But this kind of feed-based vomitorium model of human interaction can be pretty damned annoying. When I look at various feeds (regardless of which corporation is manipulating them), I get really irritated sometimes when I realize that I have to work so hard to ignore so much irrelevant crap. It feels like it was designed by a cynical PR operative and a nerd who was very traumatized by social experiences in american public high-school.

In sum, for writers with messages to sell, it can be a very useful medium, but for readers, it sucks. There’s little context, no narrative and very little control for reading other than to keep on scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until you realize that you are not, in fact, being social, but sitting alone in front of a little screen in a very non-ergonomic posture while neglecting the entire physical world around you.

A day not using facebook is like a day without Top 40 radio or H&M trousers or popular sitcoms or 3D action movies or Yellowtail wine or McDonalds burgers or Starbucks coffee. That is to say, it’s not so bad and often much more diverse and surprising and exciting. It’s also much easier than you think.

If we are writers and coders and media theorists, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t start coming up with things that are simply different, if not better, where we control the terms of service. I believe that within every grumpy, complaining curmudgeon there is actually a starry eyed utopian dying to come out. Now is a good time to get off the bar stool, put aside convenience and claqueurs, and get to work building something.

(I agree absolutely & belated congratulations on the book.)

Your comment about the effect of just a few retweets is specific to the nature of posts now. I am excited about blogging again. It has been years for me (doing almost 1 blog post a year). I am excited about doing longer form posts/essays, and short shares again. At present the small amount of my posts has just garnered some likes and retweets and some comments (I didn’t have the plugins working fully when I first posted). It will take time for the comments to happen again as hardly anyone I knows blogs still. So I’m not worried about there just being a few retweets here and there. I also don’t need there to be lots of conversation on every post. I am purposely posting short shares as well as longer pieces.

And Nick, it is great that you’re not there. I have a few colleagues who aren’t. One day many of us won’t, once again.

These conversations, and the spirit behind the #indieweb, (for me) is about bringing back the excitement I felt when I first started blogging. It is my web again, with room enough for my voice…an individual with the right to my own space.

“The movement is unfinished.” – http://www.wired.com/2013/08/indie-web/

George/Ububot, https://archive.org/details/RobotLove

Leo, thanks for starting Bot Forum — I’ll email soon to request an account and will look forward to joining the conversation there.

You both write of heading over to Facebook because that’s where things are happening: “conversations happen there” and “the former Grand Text Auto audience is now on Facebook and not on blogs.”

My question is, when did you become followers?

Jill, when you were (at least approximately) the first blogger in Norway, you didn’t do it because the audience was on your blog — you developed your blog and people came to it (and began blogging themselves).

Scott, when you were a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization and coining the term “electronic literature,” e-lit wasn’t where all the authors and readers were. It wasn’t even a thing. It was, at best, several different things that people didn’t see as hanging together. You helped us develop that category and see reading and writing online in a new way.

You’re both still doing very groundbreaking work with ELMCIP itself, the ELMCIP data, video collaboration, and self-representation. So it’s not like you have to retire from making a difference in the way people communicate online. You can set an example. You’ve done it already — you can do it again, if you want to.

Christy, I didn’t mean to be snarky about #indieweb – I actually really liked that you posted about that, and are trying it out, and I love that people are trying to re-claim the web. And I do like connecting our blog posts to the conversations taking place about them other places on the web. But the effect of all this lists of retweets also shows that a lot of those conversations are really banal. Just a retweet. Or a like. Which is actually important, but nothing like as valuable as a real conversation.

I also have this immense urge to click “like” on comments in this thread. Nick, where’s the like button?