We Have Too Many Friends Online with Ruby Justice Thelot

And your recent piece with Mozilla was really interesting about connection bloat.

And this is what I want to dive into a lot for this episode, because I think sometimes with In my recent study stuck in the screen, I found that actually people have more of a positive relationship with Instagram than we might think, although overall it can be a bit overwhelming.

But this connection bloat is interesting because people are following maybe more people than they need to be.

So can you dive into that a little bit and tell us what that is and what we can do about it?

Yeah, so I was very interested to know how people are using these new platforms.

This came about because I realized that there was all these novel modes of interaction that I was not privy to.

I'm a Zillennial, and hanging out with Zoomers, I realized that there was all this sort of new language that had been developed, say, like the meaning of an Instagram like.

I remembered specifically being told that like, as a person who's trying to date, like you need to like the other person's Instagram stories.

Otherwise they're not gonna think you're into them.

And I was like, wait, what do you mean? And so when I started digging into it, I started looking at early research on different social media, like Dana Boyd's research on My Friend and Friendster.

And she also started talking about what it was, something that we call PDA or Paralinguistic Digital Affordances.

Like the act of being put into one's top eight had a symbolic and also like social signification, which was not just mere, you know, being on a screen.

It was something effective related to it.

Yeah.

And so I figured, well, if there's all this affect related to specific parts of social media, where are the other parts where we're getting our sort of emotions kind of played with a little bit?

Yeah.

and connection was one of them right the dream of facebook or of a lot of social media social by nature is to connect to the world right um and so we go on instagram we follow our friends because we want to see what they're eating you know what store they're going to or where they're traveling but over time we started about like 300 of people we follow and we end up 10 years later from 2015 to 2025 at about 600 on on average um

Or if you're like me, like 3,200, it's pretty bad.

Yeah.

I've gotten down a few hundred, but your piece made me think I need to keep going.

Well, we meet a lot of people, so that's in our defense.

But I think this slow growth in the following is what I call connection bloat.

We start with a very, what I would deem like earnest goal of like connecting people, getting to see the content that they want to see.

But over time, there's no sort of designed reminder to call, to prune, to curate that list of following.

And suddenly you're following Ariana Grande, Al Jazeera and your ex-boyfriend.