Tuesday: walks, phone convo
Oct. 25th, 2022 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutI did the long walk in the evening and chatted with R. I also walked with M. earlier. I‘m thinking a lot about two related things.
First up: I have a theory about what happened around 2015 that totally messed us up for … years. We talk a lot about social media and specific social media platforms. Social media — FB, twitter, reddit, Insta, and earlier iterations that are no longer around such as Friendster and MySpace have an evolving array of features in terms of how people connect with each other and what they can share. Minimizing …. Terribleness … is going to involve making adjustments to those features. Increasing moderation features, in particular, is something I‘ve been harping on for decades.
However, none of this does a great job of explaining why things got so incredibly shitty around 2014-5 or so. What _does_ do a great job of explaining why things got so shitty is that smartphone sales — iPhone and Android — went to the moon in that time frame. Previously, people accessed social media on desktops and laptops about as much or more than they did on devices and phones. After, it was phones phones phones phones.
1993 was the September that never ended, but 2015 made that change look absolutely tiny. It‘s a little weird that we don‘t talk about the hardware much, and how sooooo many people who were absolutely never going to participate in social media if it involved hunching over a keyboard absolutely did go bonkers online when it involved a cute smartphone in their hand.
Second: there are a variety of mental health categories for people who say bullshit stuff all the time. There are also some medical health categories as well. But there are tons of people (can you tell I‘m still talking about 2015?) who spew bullshit all the time without ever getting near a diagnosis. I went looking for what category encompassed all of that and came up with “pathological lying”, mythomania, pseudologica fantastica. And wow, reading about that has been enlightening.
ETA:
A. had a physical, and then we went to 110 Grille. We talked about the above, and she asked if there was a test to detect someone who was a pathological liar. We found some, but agreed that asking someone if they were a pathological liar was maybe not the _best_ strategy.
First up: I have a theory about what happened around 2015 that totally messed us up for … years. We talk a lot about social media and specific social media platforms. Social media — FB, twitter, reddit, Insta, and earlier iterations that are no longer around such as Friendster and MySpace have an evolving array of features in terms of how people connect with each other and what they can share. Minimizing …. Terribleness … is going to involve making adjustments to those features. Increasing moderation features, in particular, is something I‘ve been harping on for decades.
However, none of this does a great job of explaining why things got so incredibly shitty around 2014-5 or so. What _does_ do a great job of explaining why things got so shitty is that smartphone sales — iPhone and Android — went to the moon in that time frame. Previously, people accessed social media on desktops and laptops about as much or more than they did on devices and phones. After, it was phones phones phones phones.
1993 was the September that never ended, but 2015 made that change look absolutely tiny. It‘s a little weird that we don‘t talk about the hardware much, and how sooooo many people who were absolutely never going to participate in social media if it involved hunching over a keyboard absolutely did go bonkers online when it involved a cute smartphone in their hand.
Second: there are a variety of mental health categories for people who say bullshit stuff all the time. There are also some medical health categories as well. But there are tons of people (can you tell I‘m still talking about 2015?) who spew bullshit all the time without ever getting near a diagnosis. I went looking for what category encompassed all of that and came up with “pathological lying”, mythomania, pseudologica fantastica. And wow, reading about that has been enlightening.
ETA:
A. had a physical, and then we went to 110 Grille. We talked about the above, and she asked if there was a test to detect someone who was a pathological liar. We found some, but agreed that asking someone if they were a pathological liar was maybe not the _best_ strategy.