Tuesday, July 12, 2011
What Is Interesting To Whom?
To be honest I am spending most of my time back and forth between G+ and Facebook. G+ is a tremendous learning curve. FB is where I have 1080 friends many of whom are alumni from St. John's Great Books Program and others are people who share such liberal arts "great books" interests. Someone posted a clever pic with nine G+ circles as the nine circles of Dante's Inferno which I had completely forgotten about. Another fellow posted that such was the most boring thing he had ever seen. I checked his profile to see whether he was over 13 and I saw that he has been living in Nebraska for 20 or 30 years. I explained to him that it is ok for him to find Dante boring and he is SUPPOSED to find it boring because he lives in Nebraska and perhaps what he finds interesting is Monster Truck Rallies and Hog Calling Contests ... (this is a true story) ... I suppose the reason I bring this up is that Social Networking is my only means to contact people who take an interest in things like Dante, Plato, Wittgenstein, etc. It occurs to me that only a fool would assume that the quality of "interesting" is objective for each topic and is assessed equally by every reader regardless of their education, experiences, etc. So only a fool would bother to post that some thread is "boring" since obviously if it were universally boring to everyone it would attract no replies or +1. Fashion models are interesting in nail polish and eye shadow. Hunters are interesting in ammo and the mechanical details of firearms. Programmers find something about Linux or Python fascinating. Entomologists talk for hours about insects. Lawyers find intellectual property legislation fascinating. ----- Regarding Diaspora, I will start logging back in, I feel guilty for not having logged in for several days. I did manage to add +Linus Torvalds the creator of Linux and I dropped hints to him and to Google Devs about doing things that might help Diaspora* enthusiasts. No reason why there cannot be an integration between ALL social networks both distributed and centralized (monolithic?).
