i started my own online social network once, and cultivated it like a garden, styled in a manner i hoped would make it unique and appealing, attempting everyday to push it to take on a life of its own. i made it invite-only and male-only and left it in a listserv format that didn’t require people to visit a website to make it more a conversation. i really worked very hard for three years.
and i am not sure how or where i failed, but though it still exists, it is limp and lifeless. i learned a lot about how write posts that elicit responses and for a time the members felt as though they were a part of something special, something they created. or perhaps is was just a mirage, my own cheerleader-like personality whipping some friends of mine into a short-lived sort of party that like all parties must end. they’re still my friends so i don’t really care about the network, and maybe that’s what’s at the core its demise, perhaps we all felt that way.
so i was reading that facebook’s numbers took a hard hit in january and february and it got me to thinking that social networking may have begun to run its course, perhaps sliding in to decline. but, the interwebs themselves are naught but a social network of astronomical scale and are just the latest means to interact with one another, simply tribes, nations, what-have-you.
wrapping a bar around people and corralling them in ironically concrete places such as second life failed to work because the virtual world exists but in the mind and 3D-animated avatars are in the end, unnecessary. the various mmporgs are just convenient gamer circles and myspace has become what geocities once aspired to and linkedin is strictly business.
today, the cyberlandscape seems at once barren and cluttered and the chaotic choir of empowered voices raised in indiscernible static have become the human background cosmic radiation and computers have become tuners, looking for broadcasts as well place phone calls. our heads truly are in the cloud.networks such as a few private ones to which i belong offer a freedom not known in public spaces, and silliness too — i check them more than i do my e-mail.
but while these are virtual, they share one thing in common, that their roots border on familial and predate the cyber universe in which their collective dopplelganger reside — i already know most people within them.
the virtual world on which i gaze in wonder is but the telephone and my son will think me a relic and will never know the newness nor the awe i hold and sadly, i will most likely never grasp his realm.
i am but a fool think i am seeing anything new.
it occurs to me as i watch hillary become more and more desperate, that i kinda gotta give props to mitt ‘the mormon marauder’ romney for bowing out gracefully for the sake of his party.
hillary clinton, by contrast, is becoming a poison pill — whether she hacks her way to the nomination or suffers a defeat at the convention, her antics are sure to turn off huge swaths of the party faithful, and will drive down voter turn out enough that any republican could win even without rigging electronic ballot machines.