If I'm so connected, why do I feel so disconnected?

[The Newswire]

I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could...

Read the full article

[One Eyed Cat]

We should all be out at the same club.

OEC

[Wickedanima]

I feel the same way about *******. If I didn't have friends I really only keep in touch with there, I might let it go. It made me feel left out and lonely really.

Although alot of the internet still leaves one feeling lonely, I don't think for me personally its at all about people not coming to my house anymore. I've never been overly great at being interpersonally social on an RL basis. I like the way that the internet lets you gloss over people you don't want to deal with... Or /ignore instead of having to duck my head, blush, and feel awkward that I don't really like/want to deal with them.

That aside, Twitter is fantastic. Its my favorite social networking widget yet.

[Lady Alias]

Ouch, that sounds complicated. I just use MaiSpazz to know what events are going on around town. Twitter instead of a mass email for news or links I think others should know about and to also find out if there's anything pertinent in my friends lives. Facebook for people I know in Uni. Bam-wham-done.
I kinda disagree with the social disconnection. I like knowing little tidbits here and there, but if I want to genuinely know how a person is doing, I will IM or call them.

[soma_stardust]

The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.

as someone who has a lack of a social life irl, |\\y5p4c3 and such feel like... people can at least see that i exist. oh, of course they don't give a damn about me any more that i give a damn about them...
i use it as a promotional tool, as it was meant to be. there are a few people on there who i can actually talk to and be friends with kinda... until it's all forgotten about.
i like deadjournal. i can say whatever the fuck i want without anyone getting butthurt, and i feel no obligation to give a shit about anyone.
never even looked at twitter.
and facebook looked like a waste of time, even though everyone's like "OHEMGEE YOU SHOULD BE ON FACEBOOK."
livejournal users ignore me, even though the only people i have as "friends" on there are people i actually do know. they just still don't give a crap about me. and the lack of being interested in my life causes my lack of interest in their lives.
then again, i'm anti-social and have social-aneity and panic problems. so it's hard for me to interact with people anyway. i did have high hopes at one point that i'd meet people, make friends, find lovers. nope.
the only way that has EVER happened since the advent of all this new internet hoohah has been on altpr0n sites and through modeling. o.o

[Buster Friendly]

Facebook is the best way to keep in touch with with my little brother. Otherwise I avoid those sites like the plague.

[One Eyed Cat]

Facebook is the best way to keep in touch with with my little brother. Otherwise I avoid those sites like the plague.

Yah no way I'd put my "real" name on facebook. I can't be fucked to be in touch with school chums except by choice.

OEC

[Ajax Knucklebones]

I have a Cryspace that does not have my real name associated with it whatsoever.
My Facebook has my real name, but on Facebook it's all about being polite, good-natured, and not the real me what-so-ever.
Closest thing to the real me is on cryspace.
Those aside, I really only see these sites as entertainment....Pretty much the way I see the BB boards.
I have a Livejournal too, but I think I've only written a cuople of things on there and haven't been on it in a long time.

And as far as staying somewhat in touch with friends I grew up with, Facebook is cool because none of them live close to me, so I don't have to feel "entangled" with their lives.

[Nos]

I mainly use poospace for promotion stuff. I've met I few cool people because of it and I keep in contact with some old friends. But it's mostly their for the movie/model stuff. I don't have LJ. I just got on facebook for family. And twitter is just amusing to me.

I feel like I'm myself on all of them .... I'm just more inclined to say really personal stuff on facebook since it's only family/friends on it.

[Wickedanima]

Yah no way I'd put my "real" name on facebook. I can't be fucked to be in touch with school chums except by choice.

OEC

Its hard to have my real name up thar. It makes my paranoid voices say 'eww'.

[LeilaHazlett]

Sometimes I feel like those social networking sites are helpful for me since I have really bad social anxiety it helps me keep in contact with people I would otherwise probably never talk to...but sometimes I feel like it give me an excuse to let my social anxiety get worse and not actually make the effort to call and hang out with friends.

[LeilaHazlett]

Its hard to have my real name up thar. It makes my paranoid voices say 'eww'.

I liked when only college students were allowed on facebook so you didn't have to worry so much about spam bots and such. I have my real name and personal info on there, but I keep my profile private and only have people I actually am friends with as friends on there. I don't see a point in pretending to be friends with people I don't actually know.

[Velvet-Tongue]

EAT PIZZA.. FUCK BITCHES.

Had the intense urge to type that.

But yeah, when my information overload hit I just took a break from networking. Sat down, read a book, meditated, watched a little tv and did some physical activity.

Just tone it down, no one needs to use twitter (fuck that glorified facebook status update). Having secrets between friends/information gaps is great. It gives you stuff to talk about when you finally get together.

[Morning Glory]

I don't really have much intention of trying to get back in touch with people I went to highschool with. All those people are douches anyway. I figure that if our relationships were worth anything than it would have been something organic that kept us together, not just browsing peoples names over the internet. For the most part all the people that I knew in highschool that are worth talking to are the people that are still my friends now, and whom I see all the time. And they are a bunch of luddities, most of them don't even have computers.

I use those sites almost exclusively to keep in touch with friends that I have out of state, either people that I've met online or friends that have moved away. In other words not people that I have lost contact with and hope to establish it again. There is one person that I manged to get ahold of that way, but we've only talked once, aside from me posting pointless shit that goes to everyone, so I don't see that as proving too much fertile ground to re-start up a freindship.

[One Eyed Cat]

Its hard to have my real name up thar. It makes my paranoid voices say 'eww'.

Yah someone convinced me to join 'cause you can put events up. Then, I saw the sad and sorry truth. Your boyfriend from 8th Grade will soon yank your virtual pigtails!


OEC

[Wickedanima]

Yah someone convinced me to join 'cause you can put events up. Then, I saw the sad and sorry truth. Your boyfriend from 8th Grade will soon yank your virtual pigtails!
OEC

All my ex-s found me on Myspazz. It was fun.

However, there were one or two beloved people from the past who happen to be as into the internet as I am, and I found them due to these social networking behemoths of doom.

To say I wasn't popular in school would be to make a massive understatement. I've got one or two friends from people I used to know, that found me on myspazz, then centralized themselves in the burbs of facebook. Got to give it to them, there seems to be a bit more of a conducive atmosphere for actually interacting on facebook, rather than feeling like I'm trying to make some kind of glitteratti of myself on Myspazz.

I liked when only college students were allowed on facebook so you didn't have to worry so much about spam bots and such. I have my real name and personal info on there, but I keep my profile private and only have people I actually am friends with as friends on there. I don't see a point in pretending to be friends with people I don't actually know.

Yeah, I should set it to private, but I don't want the paranoids to win. If ex-stepfathers or other nut-jobs from my past find and shoot me because of facebook... then oh well. They would have had the recourses to find me anyway. They're all getting older, who even knows if they would use the internet.

[One Eyed Cat]

All my ex-s found me on Myspazz. It was fun.

However, there were one or two beloved people from the past who happen to be as into the internet as I am, and I found them due to these social networking behemoths of doom.

To say I wasn't popular in school would be to make a massive understatement. I've got one or two friends from people I used to know, that found me on myspazz, then centralized themselves in the burbs of facebook. Got to give it to them, there seems to be a bit more of a conducive atmosphere for actually interacting on facebook, rather than feeling like I'm trying to make some kind of glitteratti of myself on Myspazz.



Yeah, I should set it to private, but I don't want the paranoids to win. If ex-stepfathers or other nut-jobs from my past find and shoot me because of facebook... then oh well. They would have had the recourses to find me anyway. They're all getting older, who even knows if they would use the internet.

Yah I became reacquainted with some good peeps as well. I dunno how to describe myself in school. Popular/unpopular doesn't cover it really.

OEC

[Malixe]

Heh. So I finished reading this and before I could reply, I found myself distracted by the idea of wandering off to facebook and seeing if I could locate (stalk?) my high school prom date. No luck there, so now I'm back.

I can't help but feel that you over-think some of these things a little bit. But that seems to be a part of who you are and what you do, and it's not a bad thing. You certainly gave -me- a lot of food for thought in this post, and I'm still digesting some of it.

I understand the feeling of disconnection, but I also understand that you can feel that way with or without the internet. For me sometimes, the loneliest place in the world can be a crowd. Even a small one.

A lot depends on what your definition of 'friendship' is, but I personally believe that by my definition at least, it's not really possible to have more than a half-dozen or so 'real' friends. It's possible to have an unlimited number of 'friendly acquaintances', depending upon your level of enthusiasm for social activity and interaction, but just not that many friends.

I remember one definition of 'friend' that resonated with me. It used the term 'refrigerator privileges'. How many people do you have in your life who, if they were alone in your home in your absence, would you (and they) be comfortable with raiding your refrigerator and fixing themselves a meal without feeling any need to ask permission first?

I don't know about you, but for me it's maybe about five, and sadly most of them are not even in the same state as my refrigerator right now.

I don't expect friendship to come from the web, though it certainly can. I do have a lot of online 'friendly acquaintances' that I think *could* be friends, real friends, if only there were unlimited time in this world. But to me, a friendship requires a certain level of investment of time, resources and availability (particularly the latter), and one person can only have so much of that to spread around. One of my friends (one of the five) gave me a t-shirt once that said, "Friends help you move. -Real- friends help you move...bodies."

What web 2.0 does is give us the tools to more effectively manage, deal with, and organize that sizeable crowd of 'friendly acquaintances', as well as give us more options for keeping in touch with family and friends. I don't really feel that it's reasonable to expect more from it than that.

What I can say though, is that I can remember back in the early 90's when I had been living in Seattle for nearly 10 years and was *still* having trouble meeting people I could feel like I had something in common with or had any interest in getting to know better. (Google 'seattle ice' to get a better picture of what I'm talkin' bout, Willis). Then I discovered BBS's, which of course later evolved into the greater 'Net.

And my social life took off. I still remain amazed at what a difference going online has made in my world. I've got more things to do, more people that I know and have common ground with, and more events and invitations than I could possibly manage to deal with. For a somewhat introvert like myself, it's kind of like being on the receiving end of a social firehose. I -still- wind up spending a great portion of my time alone, but now it's by choice, which is somehow more satisfying in a way.

I use livejournal as a way to keep up with the great bulk of my... 'FA's, let's call them for short. It satisfies the voyeur in me, because it feels a little bit like a peephole into other people's lives. You can't see everything, and you can only see what they let you see, but still sometimes it's a lot more than you might expect.

******* offends my aesthetic sensibilities because it's a great blaring, flashing, noisy mess. It's like a teenager's bedroom. I don't see much point in it, but I do have some FA's that I like to keep up with that refuse to leave it and seek out a more rational environment, so I poke my nose in every now and then and just ignore the mess and see what's up. Invariably, every time I log in there, I log off to find a handful of bogus '******* friend requests' in my inbox. If it were a club, it would be the kind of place where you would have to worry about 'catching something' every time you went there.

Facebook is just a grown-up *******. It's neater, cleaner and better organized, but just as superficial in a 'grown-up' way. I decided to let facebook be the online social network where my folks and my nephews and nieces could find me. I've linked up with a lot of my friends from other networks who are also there, and heard from a few people I went to high school with. I think Facebook is superficial as all hell, and I'm just fine with that, and I intend to keep it that way to the best of my ability.

I thought the idea of twitter was not appealing at all when I first heard of it. Another deliberately superficial outlet. But as someone who tends to run off at the keyboard from time to time (see this comment for example) I discovered that I was intrigued by the challenge of actually trying to say something, -anything- meaningful in 140 characters or less.

Its limitations are frustrating as you rightly point out, but I think of it as a form of internet haiku, and figure I could use the discipline and clarity that it imposes upon me in order to improve my communication skills elsewhere.

I'm grateful really, for all the new options and opportunities that were opened up for me by the web, 1.0 and 2.0, but I've learned not to expect too much from them either. A person can really only have so many friends before the meaning of friendship starts to get diluted down to something that's not that meaningful.

One big difference between us though, I have to acknowledge here, is that aside from your random hacker/spammer, there are very few people out there who see some perceived value in getting to know me on the basis of what they think I might be able to give them or do for them. Generally when people express an interest in me, it's because they're interested, not because they're looking for a handle on my back that they can use to climb up to the next rung of whatever ladder they're trying to climb.

It's got to be harder for you, having to try and discern between sincere interest and sincere opportunism, and I can really sympathize with that. I deal with that a little tiny bit about once a year, when I play a sort of semi-gatekeeper on video/photo access to the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, and it's way more than enough for me.

[Malixe]

Fascinating. Why does M* S*a*e get all asterisked out when it's typed in here?

[Morning Glory]

Fascinating. Why does M* S*a*e get all asterisked out when it's typed in here?

hadn't noticed that. I think it's just on your end.

but you do bring up a lot of good points. that was a hell of a post.

[Malixe]

hadn't noticed that. I think it's just on your end.

but you do bring up a lot of good points. that was a hell of a post.

Hm. If it were just me, that would be even weirder. But I don't think it is, because scanning back through other comments I notice that the experienced posters here seemed to find interesting alternatives to actually spelling out M-y S-p-a-c-* here. Which strongly suggests I'm not the only one...

And uh, thanks for the compliment!

[Malixe]

Ah well, if all else fails, read the FAQ:

Why have some of the words in my post been blanked

Certain words may have been censored by the administrator. If your posts contain any censored words, they will be blanked-out like this: *****.

[Wickedanima]

Yah I became reacquainted with some good peeps as well. I dunno how to describe myself in school. Popular/unpopular doesn't cover it really.

OEC

Queen of the Freaks... was one of my many nicknames... to put the thoughts in the right place. lol.

[One Eyed Cat]

Queen of the Freaks... was one of my many nicknames... to put the thoughts in the right place. lol.

Don't remember much beyond "Faggot!" due to how I looked/dressed. They could only take it so far though. My freshman year, some of the senior guys came to respect me on some level. I couldn't be "fucked with". Only problems would come with strangers really. There was always an altercation waiting to happen. Wait still is N/M.

Queen of freaks? Shit, that's bad? I'd have thought "Mine!!" haha

OEC

[Morning Glory]

Ah well, if all else fails, read the FAQ:

yeah, I was just fucking with you. But it turned out to be a learning experience. yay.

[Wickedanima]

Don't remember much beyond "Faggot!" due to how I looked/dressed. They could only take it so far though. My freshman year, some of the senior guys came to respect me on some level. I couldn't be "fucked with". Only problems would come with strangers really. There was always an altercation waiting to happen. Wait still is N/M.

Queen of freaks? Shit, that's bad? I'd have thought "Mine!!" haha

OEC

Lol. In the land of LL Bean, if you dressed/acted oddly it was NEVER a good thing. The 'Alternative' kids where all Jim Morrison wannabes who didn't want to chill with a fat freaaaaakkk. I think it would have been a bit different if they'd seen a chubby blond chick in floor length skirts before, but it hurt their brain.

[One Eyed Cat]

Lol. In the land of LL Bean, if you dressed/acted oddly it was NEVER a good thing. The 'Alternative' kids where all Jim Morrison wannabes who didn't want to chill with a fat freaaaaakkk. I think it would have been a bit different if they'd seen a chubby blond chick in floor length skirts before, but it hurt their brain.

ah I'm from Northern Cali so .... When I was in a smaller town was worse. I was a straight up deathrock kid. I sure as shit chilled with chicks like you. Voluptuosity is goddess-liness to me, No question you'd be on speed dial

OEC

[Clockwork Jello]

I hate *******. Its the only site I use. I think twitter is just stupid, and Im not even sure what facebook is exactly. Either way Its a love/hate relationship with Wasteofspace. Only reason I ever made one was to keep in contact with friends that moved away and there were a lot of em. Nowadays I hardly even do anything on it except log in and see if anyone messaged me and that is about all its good for to me. Its been like over a year since I put up a pic of myself on there so they are all horribly outdated but don't really care enough to fix that.

*edit for spelling*

[samanthagrace]

I am on all the social networking sites and I will admit it makes me feel really disconnected as well. I also feel pressure now to update it as well. Which is kind of strange. Maybe I am buying into peer pressure. I feel that a lot of people care more about interacting on these social networks rather then in person. I find myself talking to people in person who sit and talk about their facebook profile. I think when it comes down to it these social networking sites, feed the ego. They are nothing more then a popularity contest. Also, you notice the creepy stalker mood of facebook. Now your friends can watch your ever move on the internet.