Conversation

I have a Fairphone 4 and the battery is now at seventy six percent or so. I’ve been trying to have a conversation with Gemini about the state of the battery. In so doing I started with the question about replacing the battery but I soon moved on but AI, due to me mentioning a battery replacement is now object fixated.

I see that the drop was quite drastic, all of a sudden, after the battery dischanrged yet again to zero percent. It’s worth highlighting that this is a spare phone, just to experiment and stay familiar with the OS. As a result the battery regularly discharges completely if I leave it too long.

Years ago I saw that a UN organisation were looking for an archivist on Twitter so I got in touch and within two days I had signed a contract for work. In another spontaneous act of curiousity I saw that Adecco Geneva was looking for people that weren’t afraid of heights, so, out of curiousity I got in touch. I was then offered an interview and worked as a deicer.

Yesterday, spontaneously I joined a group for a ride to the Tour de France Femme via Strava. The day before that I meant one group via Meetup for a bike ride from Geneva, and a second via Strava for a run. The meetup group, to the best of my knowledge has no strava group.

Every single other group I know does and I find this intolerably frustrating but let’s focus on the positive first. The positive is that I had no runs for the first time in weeks, so I decided to revert to the cycling staple. In so doing I had a pleasant, quiet morning ride to Geneva with barely any cars, before having a group ride to Crans.

A day or two I opened the Instagram app and I scrolled down without seeing a single photo so I deleted the app from my phone. There was a time when instagram was a photo sharing network between friends, and friends of friends. Now it has become a video spamming platform for influencers we have never, and will never met. In essence it has become worthless, hence the uninstall.

I noticed that Threads was also saturated in video. If YouTube, FB, instagram and Threads have reels then we have four video sharing sites that share the same functionality. We have gone from having chats on Threads, and photo sharing on Instagram to a TikTok experience everywhere.

I was perfectly happy hiking in solitude for years in a row, but eventually, as normal life returned, after the pandemic I felt a sense of isolation, especially on weekends. I would see groups walking together and I longed to revert to that habit. Eventually I did and now for more than a year I have been on regular group hikes and bike rides.

I enjoy group hikes and bike rides but as an introvert I usually don’t start speaking with people near the end of an event, and if the event comes to an end then I usually don’t see people again for weeks, or even months. The result is that despite knowing hundreds of cyclists and hikers at this point, my solitude remains the same.

Two or three weeks ago I wrote that I hate Caribana but I also wrote that I have enjoyed the event the past. I also shared a walking route that I could use to get there and back, without using the car. For saying that I hate Caribana I was called a hater, and then that person tried to have a fight, in private via DMs. I said I’m not interested in an argument.

Yesterday it happened again on Whatsapp. Someone said ‘avoid having too much chatter on this group, there are hundreds of people. When I see such messages it frustrates me because at its core Whatsapp is designed for people to have conversations. The idea that we would join Whatsapp chats, to speak very little, to me is absurd. Whatsapp is designed for instant messaging. This is not a cloister where we have taken a vow of silence. This is a social network.

In the golden age of chatrooms and instant messaging there was a rule. Do not post more than two or three messages before waiting for an answer. I regularly broke this rule until at least two or three times I was told off for the deluge. From then on I posted two or three messages and waited for an answer before writing another post.

Alongside the habit of waiting for an answer after a post or two I also got into the habit of writing longer posts rather than short ones- If I have a more detailed thing to write I write a paragraph, maybe more. I prefer to send one long message than a dozen short ones.

Recently I saw a post stating that Wordpress can speak with the fediverse more effectively. For months we could post to the fediverse but if we replied to a toot via WordPress it would be lost. Those on Mastodon instances would comment but be “ignored”.

For months I thought that it was bizarre that WordPress would only broadcast to the fediverse, but not allow for two way chats to occur. I found this frustrating because if people did comment on a post I’d have to use another account to answer, and acknowledge that comment.

Yes and no. Twitter is replacing instant messaging and chatrooms. It’s an open method by which for people to communicate instantly with others. It’s also about the overheard conversation although that term has disappeared. What does “overheard” mean? Well simply that whenever two people discuss a topic hundreds of people are following this conversation and when they decide they have an opinion they can cut in. They do have that 140 character limit though, so they need to get to the point is efficiently as possible. When that isn’t possible then they can do the next best thing. Write a comment in a blog post or even write a blog entry of their own where the conversation that took place on twitter is synthesised into a more digestible chunk of information. As a result twitter is changing people’s blogging habits but the question is why people want to chat publicly rather than in an enclosed space. Today people like transparency. Disclaimer: This is a post from the 28th of Octobre 2008.