A Loss of Connection

During the pandemic (we will say calendar years 2020 and 2021 for context), I wrote very little, but when I did write, I was proud of that output. Some of my long-time featured posts are from that timeframe, like Engaging Simplicity in a Complicated Context, but I don't often have a reason to go back and review these items.

The past week or so, I have been tinkering with some code and settings behind the scenes of the site to add some vibrancy and in so doing I noted that my Micro.blog profile was pulling an excerpt that was not always indicative of the post itself. I have now fixed that by adding an intentional summary statement (not AI generated, mind you) that Micro.blog will pull in; I love those types of touches and I am glad that I have the know-how to handle it myself.

Clicking around Micro.blog for a second had me delving back into my history on that site and I enjoyed rereading some of the threads, but I noticed a few threads where people had responded to a post there and I never received it. That had me lamenting a number of things: choices I had made over time with regard to social media/networks, connections I had missed along the way, and a place for those connections to persist.

In November of 2020, I wrote Minimalism During a Pandemic and an admittedly short thread ensued, but just like other social platforms, I never cared about the amount of engagement, I cared about the connections that it empowered. I lament now the fact that these responses went unanswered; I lament the idea that there are connections to be made and we have all succumbed to the idea that they can only be made online; and I lament the idea that social media today is just a post and video delivery method.

At one point in time, these applications were a solution to modern networking, but they got too big too fast for us to use them effectively for true human connection. Back to that post from 2020, I am particularly proud of this passage and think it is apropos of the greater things I am struggling with today:

Nevertheless, the false equivalence between fear of scarcity and need is exactly the foundation of modern consumerism. Ergo, the conflation of scarcity and desire is a common thing, not a pandemic thing. Just like a number of other societal issues, consumeristic tendencies are thrown into sharp contrast by the world we currently inhabit. As this pandemic drags on, in all situations the effects become more pronounced, so desires often become needs out of a fear that there might not be an option at some point in the future.

Similarly to collections of things, modern humans have long used metrics like followers and likes to ascribe value to themselves or their interactions; in social media, hoarding people (followers) or trophies (likes) for fear of lacking value is just another example of those consumeristic tendency. The only scarcity in this dynamic is people's attention, the span of which is getting shorter by the day, which is part and parcel of the larger problem here.

The thing that I miss most now from those early days of these platforms was the networking; not hoarding people to point to follower count as value proposition, but a manageable list of engaged connections, all who wanted to interact and join in a larger conversation.