Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Thinking about social networks

My social media presence includes Twitter, LinkedIn, and Substack. The other day I did login to Facebook, but that was more a one off than anything social media related. For the most part LinkedIn is a type of currated living resume vs. any type of real social network. Some people do seem to use it in a more social way, but that is rare. Maybe it can be in some ways viewed as a replacement to the business pages of the phonebook. 

A note on phonebooks: In the olden days we used to get physically printed lists of phone numbers delivered on paper to the door of homes. This was not voluntary and it included a special section or sometimes an entirely separate book for business phone numbers. If this post is being far enough into the future that phone numbers are inherently confusing as a concept, then you should probably just skip this post and read something else. Anyway, LinkedIn is a very odd look into the way people want to be seen online in a busines context. 

Twitter on the other hand is really just an open town square of some loud, but mostly inconsequential utterances. The vast majority of tweets are seen by very few people and are of little consequence. You do get a feel for what the crowd is thinking or doing at any given moment, but it is at times highly chaotic. I keep thinking that a curated section will develop where the most powerful of the blue check marks will assemble into an echo chamber of thought experiments. That has not really happened in any sustained or meaningful way.


Discover more from Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Nels Lindahl -- Functional Journal

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading