Tom
An Old Friend
I love my home pc and my laptop. I have an android tablet and smart phone too. My preferred device is certainly my home PC. The trending I am talking about is the popularity and activity of communication sites like forums, chatrooms and social media sites.
I remember back in the 80's Usenet was the way people connected and discussed things. Its how ideas were shared and promoted. Then there was a time when chatrooms were the place to be. You could find chatrooms on just about any subject and they were crowded with people.
My favorite were the message boards and forum communities like here. Bulletin Boards, as they were once called, became so popular they even had their own markup language (BB Code).
Now we are well into the social media communities like facebook, twitter and youtube.
You can still find remnants of Usenet. There are still mini chatrooms and some forum communities but most people right now are engrossed in social media. This trending seems to be morphing into something and I believe social media is not the end game.
Advancing technology is driving the trending. It's becoming more and more difficult to find Home PC units. Everything now is geared to handheld stuff like phones and tablets. Phones and tablets are not conducive to forum communities. Communities like Alien Soup are better with a keyboard and mouse than a tiny touch screen. You get a different feel for the community with a big monitor than you do with a tiny screen that focuses your attention away from the 'big' picture. I've tried using my 7" tablet to view this site and it feels small and restrictive by comparison.
I'm a bookmarker, I've recently checked my bookmarks for the 30 or so forum communities I saved and only a few (less than 8) still remain. Of those (and some had over 5,000 members) 5 of them are no longer bulletin boards but have morphed into a type of social media. Even AlienSoup has social media components in it.
The question about trends is:
Is there a government agency/world agency or business entity that is driving people to smaller and smaller tidbits of information? Is there a push to promote selective focused thinking in the populace to hide things easier from the public?
Its certainly apparent that people are more self-absorbed now. You used to have to 'drill down' to get the information you sought. Now, you are being directed to the information more precisely and only seeing small sections of it. It goes hand in hand with the trend for instant gratification. Social media places value on 'likes' and popularity. I frequently see high 'like' counts on terrible subjects. Some of the most popular youtube videos are plain stupid yet they show hundreds of thousands of 'likes' and millions of views.
A little girl gets burned and is fighting for her life, Who 'likes' news like that? Hillary Clinton is dishonest and people 'like' it? Why would she even be in politics? Because her bad behavior is popular? Where is our moral fiber as people?
Lets go smaller...The wristwatch computer. When those become popular are we going to reduce our view of the world to a single sentence? Will individual letters come to mean complex ideals? Will new symbols be created and promoted to convey complex feelings? Who is driving these trends and to what end?
I fear that there is a near future where AlienSoup and other communities like this will become obsolete. There is already a trending away from discussions here. Its difficult to type out good discussions when you can only see a small tidbit of your composition. When I reply to discussions I back view the prior replies while composing my own. That is very difficult to do on a tablet or smart phone. Is that restriction something someone somewhere is promoting for some unknown reason?
Is AlienSoup going the way of the dinosaur?
I hope not!
I remember back in the 80's Usenet was the way people connected and discussed things. Its how ideas were shared and promoted. Then there was a time when chatrooms were the place to be. You could find chatrooms on just about any subject and they were crowded with people.
My favorite were the message boards and forum communities like here. Bulletin Boards, as they were once called, became so popular they even had their own markup language (BB Code).
Now we are well into the social media communities like facebook, twitter and youtube.
You can still find remnants of Usenet. There are still mini chatrooms and some forum communities but most people right now are engrossed in social media. This trending seems to be morphing into something and I believe social media is not the end game.
Advancing technology is driving the trending. It's becoming more and more difficult to find Home PC units. Everything now is geared to handheld stuff like phones and tablets. Phones and tablets are not conducive to forum communities. Communities like Alien Soup are better with a keyboard and mouse than a tiny touch screen. You get a different feel for the community with a big monitor than you do with a tiny screen that focuses your attention away from the 'big' picture. I've tried using my 7" tablet to view this site and it feels small and restrictive by comparison.
I'm a bookmarker, I've recently checked my bookmarks for the 30 or so forum communities I saved and only a few (less than 8) still remain. Of those (and some had over 5,000 members) 5 of them are no longer bulletin boards but have morphed into a type of social media. Even AlienSoup has social media components in it.
The question about trends is:
Is there a government agency/world agency or business entity that is driving people to smaller and smaller tidbits of information? Is there a push to promote selective focused thinking in the populace to hide things easier from the public?
Its certainly apparent that people are more self-absorbed now. You used to have to 'drill down' to get the information you sought. Now, you are being directed to the information more precisely and only seeing small sections of it. It goes hand in hand with the trend for instant gratification. Social media places value on 'likes' and popularity. I frequently see high 'like' counts on terrible subjects. Some of the most popular youtube videos are plain stupid yet they show hundreds of thousands of 'likes' and millions of views.
A little girl gets burned and is fighting for her life, Who 'likes' news like that? Hillary Clinton is dishonest and people 'like' it? Why would she even be in politics? Because her bad behavior is popular? Where is our moral fiber as people?
Lets go smaller...The wristwatch computer. When those become popular are we going to reduce our view of the world to a single sentence? Will individual letters come to mean complex ideals? Will new symbols be created and promoted to convey complex feelings? Who is driving these trends and to what end?
I fear that there is a near future where AlienSoup and other communities like this will become obsolete. There is already a trending away from discussions here. Its difficult to type out good discussions when you can only see a small tidbit of your composition. When I reply to discussions I back view the prior replies while composing my own. That is very difficult to do on a tablet or smart phone. Is that restriction something someone somewhere is promoting for some unknown reason?
Is AlienSoup going the way of the dinosaur?
I hope not!
