So about three weeks ago, there was a brief Friday stir when a new app called Peach dropped. At least one website sardonically slagged it off as \u201cthe hottest new social media app of the afternoon,\u201d and by Monday it had already been proclaimed dead. Naturally, I signed up for it, as did a couple of friends who sign up for everything that comes down the pipe just so they can have their login name. \u00a0And sure enough, of the four or five people I \u201cfollowed\u201d not one has put anything up in over a week, going on two.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Social media has a problem. Twitter doesn\u2019t seem to know what it\u2019s for and insists on trying to become Facebook. Facebook wants to be AOL – basically the Internet for people who don\u2019t understand how the Internet works – but is largely a place for baby pictures, game spam and the reposted screeds of racist relatives. Snapchat is for getting the coed in your freshman English comp lecture to send nudes. Instagram, at least, seems to know what lane it\u2019s in and is mostly a photo-sharing service, although one where you\u2019re almost obligated to have it autopost to Twitter.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s the interesting thing. I will see the same things crop up three times sometimes: on the \u2018Gram, in Twitter and in Facebook. Usually automatically, as if you have to cover your bases by making sure that it\u2019ll go onto one of the services everyone has. Or maybe it\u2019s just easier to have things automatically show up everywhere. \u00a0But it drives home the fact that if you\u2019re on social media for the purpose of keeping up with friends you already have, you basically have to have a very tight and judiciously managed Facebook account – which in turn is the last thing on Earth that Facebook wants you to have.<\/p>\n
Things come and go to try to deal with this. Google+ wanted you to organize everyone into circles, which was actually quite sensible, but Google didn\u2019t have any more success convincing people that it wasn\u2019t out to strip-mine your personal data. Path actually capped your friends list at 150 to make sure you were friending, well, friends<\/em> – but it had an even worse time with data security and sank like a rock. And Peach got traction for about thirty seconds with another largely closed model.<\/p>\n Because the fact of the matter is this: Ed Earl Brown doesn\u2019t want to have to check four apps over and over, and Facebook has the lowest barrier to entry for a civilian. You just fill in your real name, you can tell who the other people are, you\u2019re encouraged to share everything, and let\u2019s face it, Facebook is where the baby pictures are. \u00a0If you want to keep up with people you\u2019ve met in real life, your actual friends, then beyond the age of about 28 you\u2019re basically committed to Facebook as the option. That\u2019s why all these other things – Google+, Path, Peach, and whatever comes up next week – sank like rocks. It\u2019s how Friendster got smurfed by MySpace which in turn got destroyed by Facebook; in the end nobody wants to do more than one.<\/p>\n Because there\u2019s another problem, and it is this: social media is inherently shallow. It\u2019s a picture, it\u2019s 140 characters, it\u2019s emoji, it\u2019s perfectly crafted to accommodate snark and shallow reaction. To quote someone more clever than me about these things, “Like anything else virtual…social media is an imperfect repository for the content it is fed, which doesn\u2019t capture the essence of the people who use it. \u00a0It definitely doesn\u2019t reflect the things that truly make us who we are \u2013 our hopes, fears, aspirations, and burdens.\u201d \u00a0And an imperfect slice of the real world is a poor substitute for the real thing, especially when you\u2019re not enough in the real world. Which is why the slugline for Peach made me stop and think\u2026\u201dPeach is a fun, simple way to keep up with friends and be yourself.”<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure you can<\/em> be yourself on the Internet anymore. After all, twenty years on, the reason I\u2019m close to my dearest friends is because at some point we stopped being Internet friends and just became friends. Maintaining a shadow life for everyone else, especially in more than one place, is more trouble than it\u2019s worth. \u00a0We keep getting an attempt at Peach or Path or Ello or Diaspora or (INSERT $TRENDYAPP HERE) because at some level we want to have a separate space for our actual friends<\/em>, not just the voices in our phone. It\u2019s how we end up with badly-curated Facebook filters and multiple Twitter accounts and a Peach login\u2026but to get everyone on there is problematic and the edge cases are tough to judge (I really like this person\u2019s Twitter but we\u2019ve never met and I don\u2019t even know their real name so do I want them in my Real Life Friend Space?) and\u2026we all wind up back on Twitter and Facebook in the end.<\/p>\n I do want something like that. \u00a0Something ad-free, something without all the cruft of games and memes and reposts and stuff that your aunt forwards. For now, I have it in the form of two Twitter accounts, one identified as me and one not, both accessed primarily via Tweetbot, which are the only accounts that live on the phone. The larger and busier Twitter accounts where I follow and am followed by many more people? Those are only on the iPad or in the browser. The phone has become the bouncer\u2026if only the battery would hold out all day, of which plinka plinka hee hawwww.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So about three weeks ago, there was a brief Friday stir when a new app called Peach dropped. At least one website sardonically slagged it off as \u201cthe hottest new social media app of the afternoon,\u201d and by Monday it had already been proclaimed dead. Naturally, I signed up for it, as did a couple … <\/p>\n