How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
How did we move from forums to Reddit, Facebook groups, and Discord?
From the first moment I first went online in 1996, forums were the main place to hang out. In fact the very first thing I did was join an online forum run by the Greek magazine "PC Master" so I could directly to my favourite game reviewers (for me it was Tsourinakis, for those old [...]
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I didn't read it yet but wanted to share that according to Graeber, the rise of social media (and podcasts btw) came with what he calls "Bullshit Jobs" (in the book of that name). Before that, browsing the web was a much more active process, you searched for forums, clicked on a topic you are interested in or went on websites and clicked through them, always deciding what to click on.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions. That's something you can do at work when you have some free time and something might come in. It's not anymore "I want to know XYZ" but "Let's see what's new" if that makes sense.
Eh, I'm not so sure about this. I used to spend hours browsing BBcode forums back in my first corporate job just as well. In fact one could argue that bullshit jobs supported Web 1.0 internet since you had more time for the effort required.
I would argue that forums are somewhere on the continuum and the "direct predecessor" of social media if that makes sense. You already see in which topics something happened which isn't too different from following a Facebook page.
On your last point, I disagree. Time is relative. There is a difference between free time you can actively plan and idle time between meetings where your boss could bump in any time. At the end of the day looking back, you might have had enough time to write an article, but there could always be a call coming in so you end up using that time looking at cat photos and arguing with strangers about football.
This might depend on the kind of BS job though. Graeber described a wide variety and for some, your argument works but not for all.
With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions.
I mean before broadband Internet you could sit around and passively consume cable television or radio pretty easily. There's always been a role for people to act as curators and recommendation engines, from the shelf of staff picks at a library/bookstore/video rental store to the published columns reviewing movies and books, to the radio DJ choosing what songs to play, to the editors and producers and executives who decide what gets made and distributed.
I don't buy that social media was a big change to how actively we consume art, music, writing, etc. If anything, the change was to the publishing side, that it takes far less work to actually get something out there that can be seen. But the consumption side is the same.
I think you misunderstand my position. I'm not a cultural pessimist saying social media made us all into mindless zombies. You can use social media very actively by putting much thought into your posts and conversations and researching them thoroughly. And there is alot of stuff you can mindlessly consume at home long before the internet.
What I'm saying is that Bullshit Jobs created a whole new demographic with time on their hand to idly use online (since they work on computers) but not enough to be productive. As I wrote in another comment, in the time between meetings when a mail might come in or your boss might bump into you, a social media timeline is the way to go. You don't have a TV in office but access to the internet.
Bullshit Jobs
No, the actual definition that Graeber uses for bullshit jobs is not relevant for this discussion. Corporate Lawyers are his classic example, but those are jobs that don't have a ton of idle time. Other jobs, like night security guard or condo doorman, are by no means recent inventions, and exactly the type of people who used to pass the time with radio and magazines.
If you're saying that there's a rise in idle time for people, I'm not sure it comes from our jobs.
You are right that not all Bullshit Jobs have the idle time I'm talking about but enough to create this culture. But I can't say it better than he himself:
One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we’ve seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs 2018 (p. 382 of 895 in my ebook version)
I'll be honest: I found David Graeber to be way off the mark in this book (and only kinda off the mark in Debt, the book that put him on the map). Setting aside his completely unworkable definition of what makes a job "bullshit" or not, it still doesn't make a persuasive case that our social media activity is driven by idle downtime on the job.
The majority of the time that people are spending on Facebook YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are happening off the clock. It's people listening to podcasts in the car, watching YouTube videos on the bus, surfing Facebook and Instagram while they wait for their table at a restaurant, sitting at home with the vast Internet at their disposal from their couch, etc. And perhaps most importantly, it's a lot of younger people who don't have jobs at all.
So the social media activity is largely driven by people who aren't working at that moment: commuting times in mornings and evenings, lunch breaks, etc. that's not the bullshitness of the job, but the reality that people have downtime outside of work, especially immediately before or after.