Slack

When I lived in Brooklyn, most of my friends were in Greenpoint but some were in Queens and one was like all the way the hell up in Washington Heights. Even though we were all in the same city with mass public transit, because we didn’t drive, we tended to restrict our friendships to the people in our immediate neighborhood. For me, the main thing was, if you go to your friend’s house, you’re going to end up staying later than you expect, and I never wanted to have a long ass subway ride home in the middle of the night when I was exhausted and the schedule was slow, nor did I ever want to spend an uncomfortable night on someone else’s couch and then have to do the whole “unbathed, unbrushed teeth” morning.

It was just so much easier to hang out with people a short walk away.

It occurred to me today that there’s a similar thing happening online. My friendship async all happens in a Slack instance, but I have some friends who aren’t in that Slack room who I have to text. I just don’t do it as often! It involves visiting a different part of my phone. And then sometimes a friend has invited me to a WhatsApp group or something where other friends hang out, and like, I’m already in the Slack chat, I’m not going to haul my ass all the way over to another application entirely, what if I get stuck there late.

In social media, it’s the same thing, I’m on Twitter. I’m not coming over to your TikTok channel, I don’t know that neighborhood, it’s fucking far, and I’m lazy. You can come to Twitter if you want to see me, you already know where it is.