We are often ghosts to each other.

Alive, i.e., able to communicate for an arbitrarily long period, until wavelenghts change, interests diverge, sensibilities evolve independently. Or (and) simply, occasions becoem less. Yes, still we (might) talk to each other, still we (might) meet, stillk we (might) share with each other birthday wishes, and so on.

Once the communication climate optimum is over, you can’t easly reach each other anymore at the same depth level (which for the most cases is not that deep, anyway). It is in fact a very effort-ntensive and uncertain job to be able to keep in touch. And I mean at a level in which you can understand each other. Not just like sharing cat photos. Talking of which…

A failed (?) experiment Link to heading

This was in fact not an experiment, but it turned out to be one. Simply, the original “research question” was if it is possible to have exchcange beyond commenting briefly or liking something that happens to appear on one’s timeline. The actual trigger for such question was that lately, and together with the overall degradation of the experience due to algorithm changes, I ended up using this particular social platform only to send condolences to people who had lost some relative, after I somehow got to know that due to others’s mention, or theirs. Which, as I state below, is an OK way in my view to use the tools, that leaves at least some humanity in the medium.

This is the unredacted, with the exception of tags, obviously, version of a not too old message shared with all my connections on that particular platform, i.e. some 3 × 10².

Data Link to heading

Dear Friends, Colleagues, After one and a half decades of use of these tools, I would say that the most common human use cases of social media posting are like:

• Sharing something that makes you happy, like a pretty place visited, an achievement, including — but not solely — involuntary bragging. Or cat pictures (see figure 1).
• Vent, or complain
• To a lesser extent, raise awareness/campaign (that’s also one of the main use cases of traditional twitter, in my view. Meanwhile that is of course full of rubbish)

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a critic of those uses of the medium, which are very legitimate and up to a certain extent healthy, too. I find particularly valuable the posts of [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] (@ others: please don’t get offended, I like your content too, sometimes). I admit I like small scale sharing rather than the global timeline, when it comes to friends and acquaintances. But I also realise that that is also not really working. I think because of a combination of lack of (allocated, partially by choice, partially by overwhelm) time, lower interest (things change, boundary conditions change, people change). Email communication which is in fact a beautiful thing due to its flexibility, both for work and for cultivating (remote) friendship, also went south in the past several years. This is my observational data point. Another one, more speculative, is that posting or commenting is cognitively less demanding than emailing, in addition to the above mentioned temporal reason. So yes, conceiving, writing an email addressing a certain individual or group, structuring it, is more work. And it’s not as scalable as “comment once for 346 people. Click. Another job well done”. Or just be reminded of a birthday by the notification system. I know the world is ever changing. And I know my literary taste — for the few of you having a clue about it — is rather biased, but epistolaries are a good thing. For those who took part in the exchange, and for those who read them afterwards. E.g. Just think of two:

• Those of Lovecraft — excerpt e.g. https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters
  • https://archive.org/details/LovecraftH.P.SelectedLettersIIArkhamHouse1968
  • https://archive.org/details/h.-p.-lovecraft-selected-letters-iii-1929-1931
• Smaller scale, Buzzati and his “Lettere a Brambilla”

Ok to be fair Buzzati perhaps did not write to hundreds of people the same way he did with his old time friend. And Lovecraft was quite messed up anyway as a person, so I guess that correspondence was his lifeline. I am not recommending to anyone such a volume of exchanges, unless one really has a lot of time… My main use case of [SOCIAL NETWORK OF CHOICE] at the moment is to open sporadically, and send condolences via DM when I get to know that some relative dies. Which I find — boomer sensibility possibly coming out now — not so different from the pre-social media dynamics. It is a very decent use of the tool, though, as sad as It can be. Given my age, this use case is not going to go anywhere. [SOCIAL NETWORK OF CHOICE] is also a bit like a modern shitty version of white pages, and like “let me reach out to this person I lost contact with years ago, let’s see how they are”. This would be in fact my preferred use case. Which is neither supported by the otherwise doom scrolling algorithm, nor by the common practice of most users (it seems to me, at least). Sometimes I discover that someone disappeared from here, maybe because they were just fed up with bots and racist, disturbing content (which is for me instead the experience with [ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK]. Probably most of you still using it can relate). But maybe not. Maybe they are not in a good place. Maybe they are sick. Maybe they are even deceased. One just does not know. And you realise that you lost their number ages ago. But the scrolling goes on. I am not really discovering anything new here, but a good part of social media that were meant (by us, not by their creators…) to help us keep in touch, did not deliver, in reality. They do not connect us. At least [ANOTHER SOCIAL NETWORK], albeit filled with all sorts of information guano at the moment, has still some little gems of knowledge (coated in thick, crusty brown…). So please don’t click like (but feel free to dislike or out unhappy smileys vomiting, or animated Happy Tree Friends, whatever makes you happy). If you really want (but this is not a call for action), and have something you find meaningful to write, feel free to drop me an email. We shared some time along the way with several of you (I admit for some I just clicked “accept”). We might still have something to tell each other, or not. A little thought and effort would also act as a filter, if anything else. Yours sincerely.

In fact I forgot to add another - the main - bullet to the first list:

• To obtain/feel validation (see also SvG, pers. comm.)

It is obvious, and somewhat implicit.

A note to the experiment, that I meant once to make a post on its own with, but I might not. We will see. It is better to clarify here: Here they are → LBBT. That stands for Lovecraft (you would have guessed…), Buzzati, Ballard, Taleb. The authors I am most affezionato to. The latter is alive, thankfully.

Results and discussion Link to heading

Well, the filter kind of worked, I would say. Even too well.

• Either very few read it, or very few noticed. Or (almost) nobody got it.
• I got likes for the cat photo.
• The most elaborate feedback was — Justified, as I did use a sepia tone for the picture and some unintentionally dreamy expression of the feline — that they were fearing the cat was dead.

But not a single feedback on the actual matter.

Obviously I cannot rule out that:

1. The alogrithms just demoted the post.
2. It is indeed difficult to keep up with a timeline full of noise.
3. It is too much nowadays to spend time to read almost 5000 characters.
4. My prose is uncomprehensible
5. Something else

Still…

Appendix: Mortal immortality Link to heading

Sometimes we remember little things for as long a we live. Sometimes we forget stuff as it happens.

There is a word that is probably not even Italian, and I guess not necessarily vernacular for Central Italy. In the mid to late 1990s I was attending a training geological field trip somewhere in the middle of the mountains in Abruzzo. We stopped at a rural bar (which in Italy stands for cafè, or diner, or something in between). A minute, white-haired old man (it was mid morning), while we were leaving after having had a warm coffee (it was cold, probably well through Fall) asked for a mischietto. The unusual term in that contetx caught my curiosity. I slowed down slightly my steps, in order to figure out what that actually was: It seems to be a rouhgly 50% red wine, 50% gassosa, i.e., soda. An italian Summer analogue to Radler, so to say. The closest analogue would actually be a Weinschorle (SvG, pers. comm.). It is not too relevant that the season was not right, so was the time of the day.

I was aware of the concept, but not of the term. And I never heard it afterwards. Thus, it was either very local, or simply not so common. Interestingly, some instances of corporate Shoggoths pretend to know about it, but I suspect simply because of word closeness. They just look very convincing. Other instances admit not to know about it. In any case, it does show how BS, if nicely contextualised, can seem quite compelling.

Harmless case with a mischietto, yet exemplary.

The person was probably between 70 and 80 already then, and it’s 30 years ago, basically. So chances are he only exists as a photo printed on ceramic in a little cemetery in the provice of L’Aquila.

The mischietto lives on. As long as I will remember it, at least. And this text or its copy will be read by someone, somewhere on the Internet.

Acknowledgements Link to heading

Again thanks to the Internet Archive, and G. B. Piranesi for the banner image. Thanks go to my contacts over a certain platform, for providing limited, but valuable, data.