<story><title>Neal Stephenson: Why I Am a Sociomediapath (2015)</title><url>http://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text>This essay might be deeper than it first suggests.&lt;p&gt;My first interpretation:  knee-jerk reaction after reading it that it&amp;#x27;s a very typical lament about social media getting in the way of doing more important things in life.  There are thousands of blog posts repeating this message and this variation of it happens to be on HN because it&amp;#x27;s from N.S.&lt;p&gt;My second interpretation:  I lingered on his chosen word &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;sociomediapath&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;.  Since it&amp;#x27;s a riff on &amp;quot;sociopath&amp;quot;, I think what he&amp;#x27;s saying here is that he&amp;#x27;s going to &lt;i&gt;give the impression&lt;/i&gt; that he&amp;#x27;s a social media hound but behind the scenes, he&amp;#x27;s doesn&amp;#x27;t care.  Likewise, a sociopath like Ted Bundy on the surface can shake your hand and charm you with his smiles but underneath it all, he&amp;#x27;ll kill you.&lt;p&gt;N.S. has to be a &amp;quot;sociopath&amp;quot; in media because he&amp;#x27;s a published author.  He &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; go full Howard Hughes detached-from-society-mode and therefore, has to at least fake out the public with a social media presence.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that means there&amp;#x27;s a need for a web service that generates random and periodic posts on behalf of users to give the appearance of &amp;quot;Facebook normality&amp;quot;.  E.g. the website service posts random inspirational quotes from dead people or TIL from random wikipedia pages.  You never have to log into Facebook and yet it seems like you&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;with it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I believe other celebrities accomplish this with &amp;quot;public relations&amp;quot; staff.  The PR firm makes the celebrity look &amp;quot;connected&amp;quot; to the fans via Reddit AMAs and Twitter updates but in reality, he&amp;#x2F;she really isn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Analemma_</author><text>&amp;gt; E.g. the website service posts random inspirational quotes from dead people or TIL from random wikipedia pages. You never have to log into Facebook and yet it seems like you&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;with it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;For a large percentage of my Facebook friends, if they were silently replaced with bots like this, I doubt I&amp;#x27;d ever notice. Sigh.</text></comment>
<story><title>Neal Stephenson: Why I Am a Sociomediapath (2015)</title><url>http://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasode</author><text>This essay might be deeper than it first suggests.&lt;p&gt;My first interpretation:  knee-jerk reaction after reading it that it&amp;#x27;s a very typical lament about social media getting in the way of doing more important things in life.  There are thousands of blog posts repeating this message and this variation of it happens to be on HN because it&amp;#x27;s from N.S.&lt;p&gt;My second interpretation:  I lingered on his chosen word &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;sociomediapath&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot;.  Since it&amp;#x27;s a riff on &amp;quot;sociopath&amp;quot;, I think what he&amp;#x27;s saying here is that he&amp;#x27;s going to &lt;i&gt;give the impression&lt;/i&gt; that he&amp;#x27;s a social media hound but behind the scenes, he&amp;#x27;s doesn&amp;#x27;t care.  Likewise, a sociopath like Ted Bundy on the surface can shake your hand and charm you with his smiles but underneath it all, he&amp;#x27;ll kill you.&lt;p&gt;N.S. has to be a &amp;quot;sociopath&amp;quot; in media because he&amp;#x27;s a published author.  He &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; go full Howard Hughes detached-from-society-mode and therefore, has to at least fake out the public with a social media presence.&lt;p&gt;Maybe that means there&amp;#x27;s a need for a web service that generates random and periodic posts on behalf of users to give the appearance of &amp;quot;Facebook normality&amp;quot;.  E.g. the website service posts random inspirational quotes from dead people or TIL from random wikipedia pages.  You never have to log into Facebook and yet it seems like you&amp;#x27;re &amp;quot;with it&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I believe other celebrities accomplish this with &amp;quot;public relations&amp;quot; staff.  The PR firm makes the celebrity look &amp;quot;connected&amp;quot; to the fans via Reddit AMAs and Twitter updates but in reality, he&amp;#x2F;she really isn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>digi_owl</author><text>Makes me think of a recent talk at ccc.de about libusb, and how there was a &amp;quot;hostile takeover&amp;quot; in part fueled by the maintainer failing to push out new releases even though there was activity on the tracker (he wanted to make sure the new stuff worked before releasing, others saw it as the project stagnating).</text></comment>