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The changing nature of on-line discussion


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The World Wide Web (WWW) has been in a constant state of change since it became available to the general public in the early 1990's. I've had a web presence since 1995. I really can't imagine how the typical 20 year old can possibility understand a pre-WWW world. Things have improved so remarkably and quickly it is almost incomprehensible.

There are two trends that I have noticed lately that are adversely effecting the nature of the WWW

  1. Large multinational corporate websites are beginning to dominate over independent websites. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. The alarming thing is that the big sites are able to accomplish this with bullshit content and are worst of all supported by search results from Google that are biased to this type of content. I blogged about this recently
  2. On-line discussion has become more shallow and superfical in the advent of social media. This is the reason for this post.

I'm a big time user of social media. I have a prescence on all the major platforms just type "aalbc" after any socal media site and that will be me: http://www.facebook.com/aalbc, http://twitter.com/aalbc, http://myspace.com/aalbc, etc, etc. Have you ever tried to have a decent conversation on any of these platforms?

The most popular place seems to be facebook. The disclaimer that one has to type before they try to express a sentiment that requires the reader to think; "...Facebook is not the best place to have this discussion, but..." is almost a cliche now.

For the most part people don't get too deep. The conversations are fleeting. Try to find an conversation from 6 months ago on Facebook. Try to have a conversation on Twitter at all.

The other problem, with the fleeting nature of social media is that the vast majority of stuff that is written is never seen. Sure contributions made by celebrities will be read, but the vast majority of stuff posted by the average Joe will just dissapate into the ether without being noticed.

There is so much competition to be heard and so little worth being heard. There is so much duplication of effort, so much noise and so little real content...

One thing I miss are discussion baords and the types of conversations that we used to have here during the pre-social media days. Are on-line discussions a thing of the past? Or do they need to be more agressively promoted in a much more competive world?

I also miss the book reccomendations I used to get here. On social media you just have a bazilion authors talking about how great their own book is. The comments by ordinary readers on social meda get drowned out or are simply never made.

I'm going to begin to push these discussion baords more by highlighting the advantages of this type of platform over social media. I know on-line conversations are for a very small percent of the population, bt surely there are still folks out there who would like to participate if they knew where to go. I'm not sure how many outlets are still available.

If you have any comments about this discusion board, another discussion board or anything related plese post reply.

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