Infinite Digression

Improvement to social media

modified:Jan 21, 20255 min read

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“Improvements” not improvements.

Camera Shop

A camera shop should do this to revitalize itself.

It’d be a social media library function. You take your film shots to the camera shop to be developed. They are placed in the giant catalog of names and not digitized. If someone wants to see what you wanted to share, they have to come to this archive, leaf through your binder and observe what you share and write like a guestbook. A community photo album like library stacks.

Woods

The other improvement would be this the hole of a tree in the woods. You would have a service where you don’t post anymore, but you deliver your posts directly to this hole in a tree deep in the woods. If anyone cared to see what you were doing they’d have to come deep to the woods to find you. If you saw them there, you’d know it was because they were actually interested in you - not just because they were fed it in a feed.

Server

I had gone to a retrocomputing festival and posted a photo of myself with some of the mainframes. I jokingly said something along the lines of considering ditching my phone for a mainframe. What I actually had written and then deleting was a longer description that said this

Contemplating how I can replace my phone with a 20 ton room-sized mainframe from 1960s. (pictures from the eastern computing festival).

But really, imagine this: I want to message you so I put away my phone and take out a notebook. I shift cables/knobs to get the calculations right. Lights blink. On your end, a printer begins to hum and prints a message from me (which is gibberish because I made an error, one knob in the wrong position). 

I wonder what it said?  You turn on your mainframe, and begin the 20 minute long process to send me ”???” Mainframe just hits differently

This is a fantasy scenario and I am glad I deleted it (nobody reads anything on Instagram) but it gets at what I was thinking of. Everything is so feed driven and automated. There is less friction, and at times less effort in the process of things.

What this has made is that things come and go easy. But if you put effort and investment into something, beautiful things can come from this.

If you make access to yourself difficult, you’ll find less people interact with you but when people do it might be more special. Like a message that I must write myself on a paper, and then mail to you has a different weight to it.

A message sent from the server could be a type of love itself.

Guest books

Guest books in homes should come back I believe. As a popular form of commenting.

I visited this Amish woman in Lancaster county, a family friend. When I stayed at her house for dinner, she provided us all with a guest book to write something in (it was like a ledger, on gridded paper.)

It’d be an improvement to social media to have people write when they visited you if they wanted.

NOTE

This woman also has kept a daily diary for almost all of her life. She is in her 80s. I held the diary when I visited and looked at the day I was born. Her chronicles now carry in them the memory of all of my visits as well.

  • A social media site where people edit the pictures you post

    • people being strangers
    • people being followers
    • people being friends

  • A social media site where your images subtly degrade over time

  • A social media site where your older images are altered without you noticing. Settings are swapped. People are erased or inserted.

  • You take a photo at the same place every day, at precisely the same time. This project is shared. What then could happen is that someone noticed your project and joins you. Then another people does, and then many. Till the photo becomes this live environment where everyone actually meets.

Control-less and True

Using an automatic summarization technique, keyframes are extracted from the daily life of the social individual and automatically posted on the web. The user of this social media platform has no control over what is posted (besides control of their body/will to endeavor in life), it is done automatically when a “moment” is detected.

As an added element, the comments on posts are all subconsciously written while viewing the media.

For some, the viewing of these key moments exists purely of viewing the conscious moments of others. “The highlight of my day, was seeing your day” (from this oubliette).

The entire process of using this new social platform is automatic.

Rehash

A social media site that constantly digs up old conversations and posts. Everything past is surfaced.

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