I don't take issue with your assessment of what could be "healthy", but I'm talking about what people engage in. And realtime is, as you noted, behavior-altering. It engenders an "incessant need". That's real. That we don't want it to be so doesn't change it from being real. And the fact that the academically minded want to minimize it is of little importance to the 15 year old girls gossiping about each other. Or the 23 year old dudes trading sports clap backs. Or, or, or...
So yeah. My opinion on the role of constant contact in a healthy society notwithstanding, there is a consumer hunger for it and while I can see it contracting, I can't see it ever going away to a point that it shouldn't be a design priority.
Because people want to know what's up, and there are numerous social and economic rewards for being the first to do or to know about something. That's why newspapers and the like exist in the first place. Should that be everybody's focus or anyone's only focus, no. But since the incentives/payoffs for timeliness are so obvious, expressing indifference to them seems like a counter-signaling strategy.
Re:Start a Fucking Blog
by aabbcc1241 on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @08:44AM
(#34245423)
Also, if you're not very popular on twitter/fb/ig, it's rare to get realtime feedback anyway.
Curious, what is your basis for this assertion that "realtime" is the primary reason for social media? I think "realtime" has created this incessant need to watch and feed the machine. That has been an interesting diversion for a while, but I can't see it as healthy long term, IMO. I, and many others I know, check up on friends once or twice a day and then got on with our actual lives. With a less frenetic and more sane model of interaction, "realtime" is way down the list of important attributes.