So Many Thoughts

I wish I had more energy to transfer my thoughts into words because I always have a lot I want to say, it's just the actually saying it that's the issue.

Darth Tenebrous on The Sith

We Sith are an unseen opposition, Tenebrous had told his young apprentice. A phantom menace. Where the Sith once wore armor, we now wear cloaks. But the Force works through us all the more powerfully in our invisibility. For the present, the more covert we remain, the more influence we can have. Our revenge will be achieved not through subjugation but by contagion.

--from the Darth Plagueis novel by James Luceno

Social Media and A Lack of Audience Selection

I think a big problem with social media is its undirectedness.  Of course, this presents a lot of opportunities for valuable experiences, but it also presents numerous problems.  Because when we talk to people in our daily lives, whether through our voice or through writing, our words are typically targeted for a small group of people, or even only one person.  But in social media, these kinds of writings often just get broadcast in every direction, but are often actually only for the same kinds of small (or even nonexistent) audiences.  I'm glad for Dreamwidth and Pillowfort's privacy controls, even though I rarely use them, because they give more leeway for this kind of targeting.  There's a lot of reasons why certain things should be targeted to specific audiences only.  Many things have some audience for which it would be beneficial to convey them to, but also have plenty of people for whom it would not be beneficial to convey them to. Though I think getting the nuances of this right requires being able to limit audiences in a lot of different ways that aren't currently possible even in a lot of social media with privacy controls.