I happened to listen to the Reply All podcast episodes on “Jennicam” (I’m working through their backlog) while talking with an internet friend about how she was in a video and has gotten a wave of follow requests. She’s not particular about who follows her really, except she doesn’t like having her personal Instagram (with photos and videos of her real life home, workouts, cats, etc) public. Except she did dismiss a few requests from people, and one person kept re requesting over and over. The user didn’t have any posts or a profile photo. They eventually messaged her saying they were trying to follow her and it wasn’t working and could she help. What surprises me most here is that they seemed genuine about not understanding what was happening, so maybe they really are new to Instagram.

Anyway, I’ve always thought it’s pretty weird how rapidly the shift happened between an internet full of pseudonyms where no one would really talk much about their life, family, or work to what we have now. I and my friend have certainly had encounters like this one before, to varying degrees of hostility when we say hey, sorry, I don’t like TOTAL STRANGERS to see the inner workings of my life, internal monologue, work, pets and children.

I think a possible rebuttal is that no one is making people post this online, but that’s pretty ludicrously narrow vision. It feels like what’s happened with clothing and single use products: currently a popular subject for discussions about what a person could do to change their footprint but ignorant (willfully or not) to the cultural changes that have happened. Lately it has become more common to not have a Facebook account, but even this often cuts off the main point of communication for social groups, small organizations and shops, and communities. My local library still sends an email newsletter, but desiring more information on anything usually means clicking through to a Facebook event. Which you probably can’t see without an account. Even this isn’t really the point, which is that to contribute more data is also so incredibly commonplace and encouraged that I personally know very few people who aren’t invested in and don’t derive happiness, however small, from sharing their lives online. After all, it’s still people out there, and creating a shared reality and telling stories with other people is a pretty built-in human concept.

It’s just weird to me how quickly the whole emotional sphere around sharing things online moved from “a cool open concept where anyone can learn and teach and tell people about themselves” to people getting hella mad when they aren’t allowed to see the private data of someone else because of view restrictions or just a lack of presence. Even the argument above, that no one is forcing people to share photos online, isn’t even fair when someone is ready to see you in a photo or video and be enraged that when they googled you, you didn’t have the social media to follow that they wanted to see.

And now a quick topic change –

Princess Nokia, Lady Gaga, and Perfume Genius have all released new music yesterday/today and it is A Lot to keep up with but I think the new Perfume Genius single is the best. Forever the best $18 concert ticket.