Digital Homelessness
Metadata
Highlights
- In what ways are we, perhaps, “not there,” despite being physically present within a trail of garbage leading from some equivalent of an overturned trash can to a mess of stuff that pass for “possessions? Along what dimensions are you past your own Buber points, existing in a disintegrated form as an it rather than a you?
This sort of collapsed, derelict condition can appear around any disintegrating dimension of being. A simple example is me in relation to my computer desktop. It is quite literally a homeless sort of mess, stretching from the trash can in the lower right to a disorganized mess of half-filed documents and folders sprawling across the desktop, and spilling over into the cloud via Dropbox. (View Highlight)
- Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.
These are online zones where, for whatever reasons, psychologically plausible and inhabitable personas have failed to cohere for a significant subset of people. (View Highlight)
- Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.
These are online zones where, for whatever reasons, psychologically plausible and inhabitable personas have failed to cohere for a significant subset of people.
For those of us who spend a significant amount of our time and attention online, juggling dozens of fluid, shifting personas is second nature. Unlike meatspace, with its restricted range of identity performance theaters on offer — intimate, private, public, work, consumer — the online world offers an effectively limitless set of fluidly overlapping theaters. Every social medium is at least one theater of identity, and many of the more evolved media offer multiple co-extensive theaters. (View Highlight)
- The richer the medium, the more completely human it allows your constructed personae to be. And the more it allows you to be completely human, the more there is something it is like to be at home in that particular medium. (View Highlight)
- There is something it is like to be “home” on Twitter that goes well beyond what your profile (or “home”) page looks like or how many followers you have. There are some really small accounts that present as really well-integrated and at-home personas, and some really big accounts that appear awkward, disintegrated, and yes, homeless. Accounts that arouse varying degrees of disgust reactions and cause you to metaphorically cross the street rather than engage.
To be “at home” on Twitter is an ineffable aspect of being on the platform. The gestalt of your presence, the overall effect of your tweet stream in the context of everything from profile picture and banner image, to pinned tweets and biography, reveals the extent to which you are at home, versus present as a visitor, or as a homeless person. (View Highlight)
- What Twitter reveals is that being at home is largely about seeing and being seen in ways that allow an inhabitable identity gestalt to emerge for you. There should be something it is like to “be on Twitter,” a consciousness you can inhabit. Something that requires you to craft and inhabit a persona that resembles that which emerges from being housed.
We’ve come a long way from “home pages” on Geocities. (View Highlight)
title: “Digital Homelessness”
author: “Venkatesh Rao”
url: ”https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/digital-homelessness”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Digital Homelessness
Metadata
Highlights
- In what ways are we, perhaps, “not there,” despite being physically present within a trail of garbage leading from some equivalent of an overturned trash can to a mess of stuff that pass for “possessions? Along what dimensions are you past your own Buber points, existing in a disintegrated form as an it rather than a you?
This sort of collapsed, derelict condition can appear around any disintegrating dimension of being. A simple example is me in relation to my computer desktop. It is quite literally a homeless sort of mess, stretching from the trash can in the lower right to a disorganized mess of half-filed documents and folders sprawling across the desktop, and spilling over into the cloud via Dropbox. (View Highlight)
- Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.
These are online zones where, for whatever reasons, psychologically plausible and inhabitable personas have failed to cohere for a significant subset of people. (View Highlight)
- Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.
These are online zones where, for whatever reasons, psychologically plausible and inhabitable personas have failed to cohere for a significant subset of people.
For those of us who spend a significant amount of our time and attention online, juggling dozens of fluid, shifting personas is second nature. Unlike meatspace, with its restricted range of identity performance theaters on offer — intimate, private, public, work, consumer — the online world offers an effectively limitless set of fluidly overlapping theaters. Every social medium is at least one theater of identity, and many of the more evolved media offer multiple co-extensive theaters. (View Highlight)
- The richer the medium, the more completely human it allows your constructed personae to be. And the more it allows you to be completely human, the more there is something it is like to be at home in that particular medium. (View Highlight)
- There is something it is like to be “home” on Twitter that goes well beyond what your profile (or “home”) page looks like or how many followers you have. There are some really small accounts that present as really well-integrated and at-home personas, and some really big accounts that appear awkward, disintegrated, and yes, homeless. Accounts that arouse varying degrees of disgust reactions and cause you to metaphorically cross the street rather than engage.
To be “at home” on Twitter is an ineffable aspect of being on the platform. The gestalt of your presence, the overall effect of your tweet stream in the context of everything from profile picture and banner image, to pinned tweets and biography, reveals the extent to which you are at home, versus present as a visitor, or as a homeless person. (View Highlight)
- What Twitter reveals is that being at home is largely about seeing and being seen in ways that allow an inhabitable identity gestalt to emerge for you. There should be something it is like to “be on Twitter,” a consciousness you can inhabit. Something that requires you to craft and inhabit a persona that resembles that which emerges from being housed.
We’ve come a long way from “home pages” on Geocities. (View Highlight)