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Author Topic: Tech: How people use the Internet  (Read 5264 times)

Jenett

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How people use the Internet
« on: August 16, 2014, 06:41:09 pm »
Juniperberry's comments in another thread got me thinking this would be a worthwhile topic - how the internet's changed over time, and how people use it.

Related to that, I just finished reading danah boyd's book _It's Complicated: The Social lives of networked teens_ (based on ten years of research, including indepth interviews - it's available for free online from her site here - see the download link.) and I'm in the middle of an advanced reader copy of _Dataclysm: Who we are (when we think no one's looking)_ by Christian Rudder (one of the co-founders of OKCupid) both of which are fascinating looks at how people use the internet.

One of the things that I found interesting in danah's research (she lowercases her name intentionally) is that she talks about a shift from more guarded privacy (she's in her thirties, as I am) to less privacy (the Facebook initial generation) to more guarded privacy but in different ways

(Many of which are not necessarily obvious to outsiders - for example, she talks about a student she interviewed who has a Facebook account, but who disables it whenever she's not online, and who goes through and deletes all the actual updates and comments she's made when she signs off.)

So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?
« Last Edit: May 07, 2019, 05:47:14 pm by RandallS »
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2014, 07:05:20 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997

So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?


So, I got online in 1994 (when I started college), and fairly quickly found myself splitting my time between mailing lists, the campus online bulletin board system, and MUCKs and MUSHes (real-time text-based spaces for conversation and role-playing: they're similar to our MUX for chat here, but they're slightly different code bases.)

By the time I graduated from college, I'd gotten much more active on mailing lists, was posting regularly to Usenet (a topic based conversation that's basically text-only forum discussion). Forum software was still fairly in its infancy stage then, and often very clunky and slow to load and people often had horribly designed signature images you couldn't turn off. I continued with that (and with the online text-based gaming).

In 2000 and 2001, I did two things. First, I started posting regularly on the Cauldron's mailing list at the time (since I found the forum software painfully clunky) and also started (in the spring of 2001) on LiveJournal, which is a social journalling site with a variety of privacy controls.

In 2003 and 2004, I was a volunteer on the Abuse Team (later called the Terms of Service team) which taught me that people use the same technology in vastly different ways, and that people can be both utterly horrible to each other and utterly awesome to each other online, sometimes in very close proximity. I met a lot of amazing people doing that work, and it's continued to inform how I look at the Internet.

I've posted there (or now to Dreamwidth, a fork of the same code, and there) far more days than not in the years since - it's not a complete journal of my life, but it's got a lot of the ups and downs and what was going on, and commentary on religious experiences and group work, and all sorts of things. And I've been active on a couple of Pagan forums, many of them now defunct, though this is the one I keep coming back to.

I have a Facebook account (under my legal name) but almost never use it: I dislike Facebook's business model, I do not trust their privacy settings, and I am particularly grumpy about them deciding what I want to read (and whose posts I want to see) rather than letting me choose that. Also, I actively prefer longform conversation, and Facebook actively designs against it in many ways.

I have a Twitter account (under both Jenettsilver and my professional username) but rarely use them unless I'm at a conference or event or something similar, though I do dip into Twitter to see what's going on with specific events or news. And I have a Tumblr I mostly use to stash links I might want to share or things that involve pretty images. (All three of these are also a 'It's professionally relevant for me to know the basics of how they work.)

The places I've tended to form the closest connections are the places where I have the most well-rounded sense of who I'm talking to. I'm still regularly talking to a number of friends met on alt.polyamory on Usenet in the late 90s and early 2000s (which was helped by that group having occasional low-key conventions where people could meet).

My general rule of thumb is that I'm glad to meet most people I know online for coffee in a public place, but that moving from "Hey, we share the same online space" to friendship (or potential friendship) takes some combination of real-time conversation, meeting in person, and conversation about more things than the place we share in common online. And usually a fair bit of time, which is also true for how I make friendships in the physical world. (There are exceptions, mind you.)

Some places that's easier than others (for example, the nature of LiveJournal and Dreamwidth means that you see lots of different things many people like rather than just the one shared interest topic of a forum or Usenet group or mailing list.)
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2014, 10:13:22 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997
So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

 
Like I mentioned to JB, I started out in the early/mid nineties and worked my way through Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL, where the existence of my account and ability to access my friends was basically at my dad's whim. (I remember vividly the AOL update bug that would log you off but not record that you'd been logged off; when that happened to me, my dad would not believe that I was not responsible and cancelled my internet.) So it took me a while to be able to see communication online as reliable - basically until I was able to get on the wider internet.

My first mailing list was actually the Superguy list, and my first regular Usenet groups were alt.fan.sailor-moon and rec.arts.comics.creative. (Because I am a nerd.) I was downloading pagan stuff I couldn't access otherwise, but I wasn't really talking about it yet.

I discovered fanfic on Usenet and that was what pulled me on to the www, but I didn't do a lot of mailing lists. I actually did use my legal name at first - I was fourteen, what? - and if you know my legal name and my fandoms you can turn up some of my very, very hilaribad fanfic. Eventually I learned that real names were a bad idea.

I slowly started using AIM and ICQ, and making websites and joining forums here and there, though nothing seemed to stick. We all chatted and dramaed liked only teenagers can drama, about who was stealing whose website layouts and who was only using razors in their layout to be kEwL and who was 4REAL. We all had blogs that ran on B2 or Greymatter and nothing was ever locked or private but that was kind of okay because we were all like fifteen or sixteen years old.

My senior year of high school, I found online roleplaying and IRC. This was when I first started getting close to people, because we had more than just 'making websites' in common to talk about. I hung around the #sanguinarius chat (and mostly lurked) and went down the rabbit hole that was Real Vampires, dark paganism, otherkin, psionics, oh god, so many things. Also more Sailor Moon, because that was the fandom that would not die.

And then I went to college, and there was no one to tell me not to stay up all night, so I did. I got a LiveJournal and learned to lock my posts and it was glorious. Suddenly we could talk about all kinds of things, I could meet people in the comments of the posts of other people, I could join communities! I took holiday weekends and spring breaks to go and meet people, because my parents couldn't stop me now, and we stayed up all night talking and it was so intense; I don't think I'd realized friendship could do that before then. I met my first, third and fourth real relationships online. I met my spouse by arguing with her about fanfic twelve years ago on LiveJournal. (For the record, I was totally wrong.)

I had mostly petered out on using LJ because of personal issues (including my mom reading the journal and my abusive SO at the time) when Dreamwidth launched, so jumping ship seemed natural as a part of the process of getting ready to leave the now-ex - I could have a journal that she couldn't read and wouldn't find. Now, in the community department, DW is a lot quieter than LJ. I don't feel as involved. But when I look back at LJ, well, LJ's a lot quieter than LJ used to be. I don't mind it, but it means I do a lot more talking to a fixed audience (my access list) than to wider groups.

I have a facebook account, but I check it only sometimes. I've never really clicked with their format or their style of group. There are other places I go occasionally, like tumblr and deviantart, but this and DW are really it.
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Juniperberry

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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #3 on: August 18, 2014, 01:30:49 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997
J

So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

My first experience w/internet was in '93. Went to an upper-class friend's house who dialed in, showed me some things, and then had to get off so the phone would be available.

I spent several years in foster care and internet/computer wasn't really a priority to the low-income homes I was in. Though, I did stay in one home ('96? maybe?) for a few weeks that had internet, and they allowed me one half-hour on AOL chat.

My next experience with internet was in 2000, after joining the military, and was only used professionally.

In 2002, we were living in Germany and my husband managed an on-base internet cafe for awhile. Didn't do much online then either, except to play yahoo! games while waiting for him to get off work.

In 2004 we purchased a computer and got internet and that's when I became a bit more active (not too much, because it was .5 euros a minute). At first it was just for games, email and news but I eventually started looking into pagan sites. I became a regular poster on The Pagan Grove until it breathed its last back in...'09?

But anyway, 2004-2014. I spend most of my time on here, asatru lore, pop culture boards, reddit, email, wordpress, cracked and...not much else other than searching any random thing/question that pops into my head. I quit myspace when FB got big, and quit FB about two years ago.
« Last Edit: August 18, 2014, 01:31:17 pm by Juniperberry »
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #4 on: August 18, 2014, 02:32:08 pm »
Quote from: Juniperberry;156278

But anyway, 2004-2014. I spend most of my time on here, asatru lore, pop culture boards, reddit, email, wordpress, cracked and...not much else other than searching any random thing/question that pops into my head. I quit myspace when FB got big, and quit FB about two years ago.

 
Yep. The distinction between internet access in the US and in the UK and various places in Europe where phone access was highly metered in the 90s and early 2000s created some really different patterns.

(I should note: I live in an area at the moment where there still isn't highspeed access in my county outside the center of town for a lot of people.)

Your comment in one of the other threads also made me think of another set of patterns: because I started posting on Usenet and other forums at a time when a number of people were dealing with dial-up (and so for cost and time-downloading reasons, there was a lot of incentive to stay on topic) I very much got in the habit of not doing purely chatty posts.

I do them now in other places, but I still don't do them on forums very much, because something in my brain is decidedly habituated to 'chatty stuff doesn't really go there'. (Instead, it's something I do in real-time conversation, or my Dreamwidth/LiveJournal accounts, or something where if someone is reading it, I'm pretty sure they're fine with me being chatty.)

I'm curious about other people's experience/habits with that now, if anyone else has thoughts on that bit.
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2014, 04:40:52 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997
So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

My only connection with computers back in the day was in research. Then I discovered that the possibilities of communicating with like minded people was global! Of course I reacted like a child with a new toy and of course, I got burned .

I ended up taking a diploma in computer security in my spare time but what I learned there never left me.
I've never felt 'free' on the internet.It's not that I think someone could be bothered to scan through billions of documents to find me ( I can't find myself on the 'net and I'm good with that) but I felt I spread myself out ,hmmm, too far?  in the early days.
I've been totally shocked at how 'surface' much of internet communication is for all it looked like a brand new social world opening up. It isn't.  

Having said that, I'm mindful that it *is* a wonderful too for those who for whatever reason cannot freely socialize to reach out and that's a wonderful thing.



These days I usually only go to a few places. Besides letters, my main use of the computer is to access books and films.  

My kid was telling me about an article he read the other day ( sorry, I'll have to wait to get the name) about how many people,women especially, will come to find their early self exposures will come back to haunt them when they are older, especially those in certain careers.

I found this a great article ( it's a bit of a slog) but it sums up my trepidation in emersing myself the way I used to. I have come to realize that the 'real' me cannot be known on line, nor can I assume what and who I encounter there are 'real' , ether.

"In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

From:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
« Last Edit: August 18, 2014, 04:41:29 pm by carillion »

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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #6 on: August 18, 2014, 07:53:14 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997

So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?


Man, this makes me feel old. You want to know how I first encountered the internet? As an activity at science camp. (We learned how to exchange emails with another science camp in Nova Scotia or somewhere).

My family got an internet connection around 1998, and thinking about it, some things haven't changed at all : my and my brother's favorite site was called You Can't Do That on Star Trek, and was an early version of image-meme sites like Cheezburger is today. I remember when the Hamster Dance went viral, years before viral media was a widely known concept.

I spent, and still spend, most of my online time in spaces for user-generated fiction; these days, fanfiction, and back then, furry fiction. Today, the Internet is so pervasive that we tend to forget what a big change it was that anyone could post anything.

I found TC back in, I think, 2004? It was the first Beehive version of the board, anyway. This is the only social-type space I regularly post in (though I lurk a few others).
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #7 on: August 19, 2014, 01:00:42 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;156286
Yep. The distinction between internet access in the US and in the UK and various places in Europe where phone access was highly metered in the 90s and early 2000s created some really different patterns.


I mean to say .05 euros, but still the same thing. :)


Quote
Your comment in one of the other threads also made me think of another set of patterns: because I started posting on Usenet and other forums at a time when a number of people were dealing with dial-up (and so for cost and time-downloading reasons, there was a lot of incentive to stay on topic) I very much got in the habit of not doing purely chatty posts.

I do them now in other places, but I still don't do them on forums very much, because something in my brain is decidedly habituated to 'chatty stuff doesn't really go there'. (Instead, it's something I do in real-time conversation, or my Dreamwidth/LiveJournal accounts, or something where if someone is reading it, I'm pretty sure they're fine with me being chatty.)


That makes sense.

Kind of in the same vein, I know I tend to put my online interactions in separate categories. TC is usually just strictly pagan type discussion. For example, one of the PopC forums is discussing Robin Williams and I'm involved with that, but here, not at all. I also don't discuss religion in my non-religious spaces, even if they do. So I can see how/why you designate certain areas as 'chatty' and not others.
The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. [...] The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most.--Elon Musk

I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," [Bill] Gates wrote. "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don\'t understand why some people are not concerned."

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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #8 on: August 19, 2014, 02:26:31 pm »
Quote from: Jenett;155997
So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

 
Mmm.  My father's got government ties, so he had internet stuff back in the 80s, but I never did anything with it - aside from occasionally peer at the screeching of his 1200-baud modem.  (In, um.  1994, it must have been, I had a long-distance boyfriend who did BBSes and such, and I would email him through my father's email account at work by handing my father a floppy with the file on it and getting a floppy back with any response.)

I got online for real in the autumn of 1995 and started screwing around with my college's internal BBS system and picked up MUSHing, a text based online roleplaying thing.  (Which is, at root, why I'm responsible for the MUX the way I am; near twenty years of experience with the codebase hasn't made me the most elegant coder ever but I can usually make something up that works.  I mean, I've got a buddy who's a better coder than I am by a long shot, but his code is made almost entirely of commas....)

I made a website on my roommate's best buddy's server, but I didn't do much with the web. (Up until a little more than a decade ago, my response to people offering me URL links was roughly "Is this really worth me opening a browser for?")

MUSHing and mailing lists were my first round.  Then usenet.  Then Death Of Usenet Predicted News At 11, and a while after that I sort of drifted off, and I stopped paying for my news server a few years ago.

Currently, my online stuff is two private IRC channels (for talking to two different sets of friends), two MU*s (no longer much used for roleplaying, alas, and I rather miss that) used for talking to two different sets of friends, a web-based livechat used for talking to another set of friends (is anyone seeing a pattern here?), email for one on one communication and work, this board, and reading an approximate fuckton of blogs and occasionally updating one or more of my own.  (I have three; a personal, a sensitive-topics, and a religious/professional.)

I've gotten less and less engaged in large public conversation, in part because the places I hung out on usenet stopped being functional for the conversations I wanted to have, and basically TC is the closest thing to usenet I have left. :(
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #9 on: August 19, 2014, 03:12:36 pm »
Quote from: carillion;156305

I found this a great article ( it's a bit of a slog) but it sums up my trepidation in emersing myself the way I used to. I have come to realize that the 'real' me cannot be known on line, nor can I assume what and who I encounter there are 'real' , ether.


I suppose that depends on what you mean by 'real'.

Personally, I don't think it's so much a question of realness, but - as danah boyd puts excellently in the book I referenced in my first post, an issue of collapsing contexts. Namely, that it used to be that we could focus on some parts of ourselves at work or at school, and different parts with our family or at home or friends, and those different aspects weren't particularly visible to the other parts of our life all the time.

In a Facebook-nothing-is-private model of the internet, that's not true anymore. (And danah's book talks about a lot of different ways teenagers manage that.)

I'm of the internet generation where it was routine to use a persistent pseudonym or username for online personal stuff from the beginning. (And in fact, when I started building an online internet presence for professional purposes, I had to do it very deliberately.)

I think both are really me. (And people who read both the stuff I do as Jenett and the stuff I do as my legal name don't see a lot of distinction: I don't talk about my health issues or my religious life under my legal name, but I don't talk about some pieces of my professional life much as Jenett either, so. And in my case, I have paid published work under the name Jenett and a much wider readership between various projects than my professional blog or stuff done at work.)

I'm quite open about my legal name with many people who know me primarily as Jenett, but I avoid connections that appear on the surface of the web or for easy searching. That works for me. (I'm well aware that Google and other entities can match up the two identities, but I am generally not worried about that as long as it's not visible to casual search.) Other things work for other people.

I'm pretty sure I read the actual book you refer to (Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age) when it came out, though of course, four years is an aeon when it comes to anything discussing the Internet (since the actual writing of the book adds time on the front end.)

For people interested in a more 'specific situation' centered book, I also recommend looking at I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy by Lori Andrews (which came out in 2013). I have some issues with it (for one thing, like many books, she sort of assumes that social networking on the Internet started with MySpace and Facebook, and that's just not true), but it's a through overview of various major issues, cases, and types of problems from that point forward.
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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #10 on: August 24, 2015, 01:33:58 am »
Quote from: Jenett;155997
So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

 
I mostly wanted to say what a fan I am of this thread. It's a question I roll around a lot in my own artistic practice and research. Some awesome history I wasn't aware of has been brought up here, too.

I first logged on to the net in 1998. I was an avid AIM user (both to chat with RL friends and meet new people), nerdy geocities site builder who liked to trade code for various glitter effects with friends online, and browser game player. For a long time in between then and now, I've mostly used the internet for research, reading, time-wasting, youtube, and facebook. More consumption than creation or discussion.

A few months ago I joined a tarot forum and it really made me realize how small my online bubble had gotten, and how much I enjoy being connected to a digital community.

I used to be utterly enthralled and enchanted by being able to meet interesting new people in chats, create alternate (or hyper) personas for myself, express interest in niche things that my RL circles weren't into, and build my own corner of online expression. The landscape of the web has shifted so much towards 'truth' and self-branding. The net isn't supposed to be a place to play and discover, but to appropriately represent your best self for future employers or stalky ex lovers/coworkers/classmates, etc.

So - returning to the niche social-type environments online (like this one) are a very exciting and welcome change of pace for me.

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Re: How people use the Internet
« Reply #11 on: August 24, 2015, 02:57:59 am »
Quote from: Jenett;155997

So, I'm curious. Where do you all spend time online? How's that changed from where you've spent time in the past? (I'm personally more curious about *type* of place, rather than specific identified places - I'll post a comment in a couple with my own history in case that's helpful.) What's changed in your experience? What hasn't?

 
My first touch with the Internet came in 2008. At the time i've spent most of my time learning guitar and playing MMOs.

Now i still use it for gaming, but for forums, to connect with other musicians and to connect here in Cauldron.(Yes my free time is mostly 2-3 hours per day)
Up until August i used it for reading the political new of Hellas but after some point i really got bored from all these lies so i decided to use this spare time for something more useful. I really like politics but this reminds me more of marketing than politics and trying to prove your ideas right.

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