Things fall apart. Take Twitter. It's over, done with. It's an ex-songbird.
I mean, millions of people still use it, and more are signing up. People are rushing to the service, especially if they have something they'd like to sell you. But the people who drew me to it just aren't posting much any more. The new joiners, who mostly seem to be self-promoters of some variety, aren't the people I want to be talking to. The fertile conversation that made it such an amazing place seems to have faded. The spark is gone. It might be time to pack up and move on.
I used to enjoy this kind of thing. The Internet is a tribal place in which different demographics colonize different Web services. From time to time, whole networks of friends migrated from one website to the next; it was fun trying to guess where the next social networking stampede would occur. But here we had all just arrived on Twitter, and now people are dropping out again. My silly net generation has become digitally nomadic, wandering from one patch of the Web to the next. And I'm tired of it.
Twitter provided a roost for tech and media types. And, for a while, it was making inroads into the general population. But now, it seems to be choking on its own success. Not only is it breaking down all the time, but the crowd has changed. It's getting flooded with celebrities and corporations, marketers and sundry PR offices, all pinging out press releases.
This makes it difficult for new users to see just what makes Twitter worthwhile. And while veteran users are keeping up the pace, the people I know who live outside the technology and media bubbles are using it less and less. The dabblers have stopped dabbling. Anybody who hasn't joined has pretty much had it with reading about Twitter in the news. (I know, I know.) Of course, this might just be a transitional phase. And Twitter has been crippled here in Canada by its partial inability to work with cellphone text-messages, which, if functioning properly, would make it much more useful for new users. So another tribal migration is afoot.
It saddens me. I've spent the last few years gleefully disdaining the Web's strangely named fads, and Twitter was as strange and faintly ridiculous as any of them. But now I find I've migrated one too many times.
When I launched myself onto the Internet as a freshman in 1997, everybody was taken with a chat program called ICQ. It turned out that some residence pals who were profoundly reticent in person – and completely mute over the telephone – were quite talkative online. That's how I made some of the friendships that got me through the bleaker days of university.
ICQ's popularity faded, and my peers migrated to MSN, which in turn was abandoned during the Facebook blight of 2007. More recently, Facebook's annoyances led to a minor exodus to Twitter.
I've spent the last few years gleefully disdaining the Web's strangely named fads, and Twitter was as strange and faintly ridiculous as any of them. But now I find I've migrated one too many times.
For me that's five different networks, which is probably fewer than most have gone through by now. Everybody can recite their own list of services that they've signed themselves up to, thrown themselves at, and eventually drifted away from, only to start again someplace else when their friends do too.
That comes at a cost. Social networking involves creating a new identity for yourself on each site. It's more than just coming up with a name and uploading a profile; you have to find a new voice in each new medium. You have to pour yourself into it.
What troubles me more is that people get lost along the way. Online friendships are real. Every time social networks migrate, people fall by the wayside. Some people can't be bothered, and others like things the way they are. Just as some people make better pen pals than lunch buddies, and others chat on the phone but stammer in person, different people thrive on different websites.
When you lose a social network, you lose friends. As long as the Web is made up of social networks that act like competing fiefdoms, trying to monopolize the social graph by grabbing the most users, it will always be this way.
Loss is a part of life. People up and move across town, or move around the world. Friendships fade and relationships end. But after so many years of it, I find there's something unnecessarily sad about relationships that fade because the websites that enabled them one day wither up and blow away the next.
We'll never be rid of the ever-shifting nature of the Web's tribes, because without them there would be no impetus or reward for the innovation that gave us Facebook and Twitter in the first place. But there's a quiet, sad irony in the fact that social media, which promise a world of endless connection, sever old ties as they create new ones. Watching Twitter's flock start to disperse and reform itself in ways yet unknown, we have to remember that this network of ours isn't just an endlessly tweeted hello; it's also a perpetual goodbye.
