On Online and Offline Culture

The Guardian has an article about Going Offline is Fun. It’s about how “young” people are trying to disconnect from mobile phones and other technology. There was another article about how 61 million CDs have been sold as people buy physical media rather than digital copies.

When the web and social networks were young and built around communities rather than the cult of personality (aka Influencers) it was rewarding because the more time you invested in a community, the more you became a part of it. It was also a time when no one was online, so you had to spread the net very wide, globally, to find like-minded people.

The Summer of Ludd, whilst great in concept is just a backlash to the cult of personality that masquerades as social on antisocial media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more. With the cult of personality, and the time suck of reels people are wasting time on antisocial media, rather than investing it. That’s why they feel that disconnecting from smart phones is a good thing.

They have been fatigued and brain washed into thinking that social media, and online social networks are a toxic waste of time, because that’s how Facebook and other companies can keep their toxic social networks going, as toxic social networks.

Compare Meetup and Strava, as healthy social networks/social media, compared to Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. On Strava, and Meetup, we barely exchange anything in typed form. We join an event, we participate, we run, cycle, hike and walk together, and then we disconnect except for kudos, until the next ride.

In parallel we have GoSocial, the Nyon Social Crew, the Ochsner Sport Running Group, Tête de Course whatsapp chats and more. When Twitter, and Facebook were new, they were huge, because they needed to be. Now that everyone and their pet is on Whatsapp, Strava and Telegram (especially for the Ingresss game) we don’t need the social media giants anymore. We have local communities with online presence.

My use of smartphones and social networks, and social media, has always been about connecting with people online, with the ambition of meeting them in the physical world, rather than just keeping things “virtual”. I use “physical”, rather than IRL because to me, on a healthy social network we are real about our passions, and more.

In 2007 several people said “I feel like we have been friends for years, and yet tonight was the first time we met in person”. For me, that is a healthy social network situation. For me, that’s what social media should be.

The Summer of Ludd and other movements are rebelling against corporate utilitarian antisocial media, rather than smartphones and online social networks.

When you have gone from meeting people in person, to online discussion forums, to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and from dial up modems to ISDN lines to broadband to ADSL lines and from being offline when you weren’t at a computer to online everywhere, so we have seen the positive, rather than the negative.

Too many people, especially the young, but also mid to late adopters think that smart phones are about addiction. They ignoring that for introverts, in the 21st century, and people living alone, and working at a computer, rather than with people, smartphones, and social networks online are our social anchors, and that without them the loneliness epidemic would be even worse.

When social media giants, Apple, and Google/Android allow for dark design patterns to make smartphone and social media use toxic they justify our shift away from their platforms and devices. They make returning to feature phones, photo cameras, music CDs and printed books justifiable, because none of these will distract us. They allow us to focus, and be in the moment.

By not self-regulating they encourage a cultural backlash via movements like the Summer of Ludd.