The Future Is a Tiny Internet - Chia’s Blog
Metadata
Highlights
- Instead of raucous laughter over tangled earphones or the love of displaying myself all over an iPad, the internet felt most intimate to me when I was with people over long drabbles of text and chatlogs now irretrievable.
- Our current social tools make this kind of ghastly lurking a lot less possible––and I get it, it’s undesirable. On Discord, I have to go Invisible, but my name still treads in every community I’m in. On Twitter, it’s maintaining private lists and reading through them instead of following people. Reddit and 4chan are still the best places where I can maintain this behavior since you only are seen when you truly want to be (though they are the hardest to monetize). While ghostly, they are still the most tight-knit communities that exist. The cultures, trends, and inner knowledge present within a subreddit easily rival the sense of community in smaller Discord groups. It manages to feel “tiny” and welcoming, even if numerically it’s far more than that.
- Mentoring and teaching people, I also come to understand how advice through text is more meaningful and permanent (things I desire, even if the internet exists to resist them) than spoken words.
- So here’s a case for tiny, intimate internet spaces. “Tiny” does not have to exist in numbers, it can also exist in cultures. Little forums and groups tucked away and servicing friend circles and niche interests, virtual avatars that act as extensions of ourselves without the labor of presence, the ability to weave between circles with many pseudonyms (as done on archiveofourown), concentrated updates and dialogues that prioritize safety, immediacy, and privacy.
- It’s easy to read social media as a place where young people are constantly vying for social capital, but the class of people who perform for an audience is a small fragment compared to the hundreds of people who dwell, watch, and later depart to go to their own spaces –– if they have any. And even if safety and privacy aren’t immediate, obvious needs for the masses wistfully surfing the internet today––is it a cruel thing to want to offer this as we approach a decade of retracted deference to our data?
- There’s simply a case to be made for spaces where we can cradle ourselves in, carving out universes and spaces and shared languages through text and image and memes and all the glory of the infinite mediums we have at hand… these days, I know I am all for it, as I have been built by it.
title: “The Future Is a Tiny Internet - Chia’s Blog”
author: “chias.blog”
url: ”https://chias.blog/2021/the-future-is-a-tiny-internet/”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
The Future Is a Tiny Internet - Chia’s Blog
Metadata
Highlights
- Instead of raucous laughter over tangled earphones or the love of displaying myself all over an iPad, the internet felt most intimate to me when I was with people over long drabbles of text and chatlogs now irretrievable.
- Our current social tools make this kind of ghastly lurking a lot less possible––and I get it, it’s undesirable. On Discord, I have to go Invisible, but my name still treads in every community I’m in. On Twitter, it’s maintaining private lists and reading through them instead of following people. Reddit and 4chan are still the best places where I can maintain this behavior since you only are seen when you truly want to be (though they are the hardest to monetize). While ghostly, they are still the most tight-knit communities that exist. The cultures, trends, and inner knowledge present within a subreddit easily rival the sense of community in smaller Discord groups. It manages to feel “tiny” and welcoming, even if numerically it’s far more than that.
- Mentoring and teaching people, I also come to understand how advice through text is more meaningful and permanent (things I desire, even if the internet exists to resist them) than spoken words.
- So here’s a case for tiny, intimate internet spaces. “Tiny” does not have to exist in numbers, it can also exist in cultures. Little forums and groups tucked away and servicing friend circles and niche interests, virtual avatars that act as extensions of ourselves without the labor of presence, the ability to weave between circles with many pseudonyms (as done on archiveofourown), concentrated updates and dialogues that prioritize safety, immediacy, and privacy.
- It’s easy to read social media as a place where young people are constantly vying for social capital, but the class of people who perform for an audience is a small fragment compared to the hundreds of people who dwell, watch, and later depart to go to their own spaces –– if they have any. And even if safety and privacy aren’t immediate, obvious needs for the masses wistfully surfing the internet today––is it a cruel thing to want to offer this as we approach a decade of retracted deference to our data?
- There’s simply a case to be made for spaces where we can cradle ourselves in, carving out universes and spaces and shared languages through text and image and memes and all the glory of the infinite mediums we have at hand… these days, I know I am all for it, as I have been built by it.