Time Magazine thinks Facebook’s “25 Things About Me” meme is dumb.
Jon Stewart hates Twitter.
The LA Times argues that social networking hasn’t made us any more social.
I am pretty in to the whole social media thing — I am a faithful reader of Mashable — and I have a history of being very strongly in favor of making the web a huge personal publishing platform for everyone. My stance has always been that if every mom had a way of sharing their thoughts the world would be a better place.
Lately though I’ve been wondering if all these new content platforms are actually.. killing content. Who is creating the neat websites that we used to blog about? (Note: not me.) Books become essays, essays become blog posts, blog posts become 140 character status messages. (Amusing: the book Twitter for Dummies is 288 pages about 140 characters.) It seems like it’s not entirely impossible that within two years we’ll be communicating solely through acronyms and bulleted lists. Will it still be content at all, or just self-contained egocentric notes being shouted out in a storm of voices?
And if I really feel strongly about this, shouldn’t I be helping by creating actual unique genuine content that is more than a sentence? Hmmm. All this thinking about stuff is making my fingers tired, so let’s just have a list of things about me! (I am not interesting or patient enough for 25 items, so instead here are 10.)
1. I didn’t attend kindergarden, or grades 4 and 6. I just didn’t.
2. The town I grew up in didn’t have access to funky hair colors way back when, so I dyed my hair blue with bleach and kool aid.
3. I sailed a replica of a wooden Spanish longboat at the Brest, France maritime festival in 1992.
4. My Dad almost named me “Shasta Daisy”.
5. My favorite Beatle is John.
6. I threw a glass of water at a hobo once. I also punched a really obnoxious street kid in the nose.
7. In grade 10 my friends and I secretly ran a fake Student Council president campaign for the mysterious and non-existent “Bob Aran”.
8. My mother once told me, “No matter how poor you get, never buy second hand shoes”, and I still feel that’s a damn fine life lesson.
9. I don’t like conflict, particularly when I was younger. Instead of quitting jobs or making appointments I have had brothers die or be horribly injured, family members go missing, and broken my leg a few times.
10. I have never broken any major bones, although I did pop a chip off my left index knuckle once. It hurts in really humid weather, which kind of pleases me because it seems poetic.
I’ve always followed the paradigm of the internet as a digital wasteland. There is good content out there but there is a lot of useless junk that you have to sort through to find anything. Making the ability to publish content available to the masses does not necessarily make the content better it just creates more of it.
Easy access to content distribution does have the upside of allowing people to create and distribute brilliant stuff that would never be seen by anyone without the internet. The problem is of course finding it. How often are you searching for some really incredible thing you don’t even know exists? I have to believe the content is still being created. Unfortunately, finding it gets more difficult all the time.
Social networking provides a few valuable things:
1. The ability to stay in touch with people regardless of distance or schedule. I’ve kept in touch with friends that I rarely have the opportunity to see in person. Realistically, I would have no idea what most of these people are doing otherwise.
2. It allows people to point out the gems that they find hidden in some digital oasis. Sure, I don’t always agree that the finds are amazing to me. I am curious about what other people find interesting anyway.
3. It provides an opportunity to for anyone to easily distribute content and information to anyone listening. Getting the good content to an interested audience through all the chatter is the trick.
4. It allows people to share about themselves on their own terms.
Memes are probably overdone a bit. However, they allow people to share bits about themselves, that they feel comfortable with, coordinated within a larger group. Everyone fills out the same list and they you get to compare. I’m quite certain I would have never asked about your antics in 10th grade or any of the rest of the items on your list. All the same, the list does provide some insight into who you are.
As for Facebook, anything tied to my actual name is going to remain reasonably tame. Considering the common use of Facebook as a work networking site, it is too close to impacting a paycheck for my tastes. What gets posted pseudo-anonymously elsewhere online will be more real. Employers, prospective employers, and co-workers really have no need to know what my political opinions are or what my social life looks like. If they dig for it they will eventually make the links but I see no reason to make it easy.
Hmm… that got rather long for a comment. I probably should have reworked that into a blog post of my own somewhere. I may yet do that.
Heavens, SDZ, that was a pretty cogent and interesting reply. Are you sure you’re on the right blog?
I kid, I kid. You bring up an interesting tangent, which is the integration of real and carefully constructed online lives. I recently dealt with this on a smaller scale – I have Jessica/jezzicuh, blogger and journaler and commenter, and then also a somewhat well established identity from a MMO game that also has a blog and a Twitter and so on. It gets very difficult to keep the two apart, and in fact I’ve given up on that as far as my lifestream goes.
I know at least one person who refuses to Twitter because they think it’s unseemly to spew one’s life all over the internet. I can’t say that they’re entirely wrong.
I hope you’re right that people are still out there creating amazing content. We’re lacking search and context now, I think. I find even now with what I think are above average internet search skills I have a hard time turning up interesting resources on things that interest me.
(If you decide to work your comment into a blog post, come back and share the link. I’d be interested to read it.)
I really compartmentalize what goes where. I use LJ for occasional life updates, keeping track of what is going on with people, and finding out about social events. Game Identities are relegated to in game and game related forums. I have a political blog suffering from tragic neglect. I keep meaning to create a personal blog for long form, non-political stuff. Unfortunately, I keep putting that off. Those thoughts still end up mostly in local text files.
Having recently started with Twitter I don’t think I’m utilizing it well yet. I do find it an fascinating medium. I think it has potential for interesting conversations and information distribution. It also has the possibility of being a tedious catalog of the mundane.
I’m sure the content is still being created. I still run into great stuff from time to time. Besides, it would be too depressing to think that it had all simply died out and the internet was slowly devolving into the worst of MySpace.
Oh, d’oh, I know who this is now. Don’t mind me.
I’m so torn on Twitter. As a coder with a couple of web apps under my belt I was really dismissive of it at first. Great, you can enter 140 characters into a database and it shows up on your webpage. Wheeee. As an old school blogger, too, it seemed to oversimplify personal publishing into almost nothing.
Then I got one, and I really enjoyed the social circle message board functions. It’s a nice way to stay in touch throughout the day. If you’re clever enough, it’s also a simple way to publish amusing thoughts, and I admit to being more appreciative of Twitter as a broadcast medium.
However, it honestly wasn’t until I looked at Twitterfall yesterday that the grand scope of it clicked. I used the keyword “Vancouver”, and suddenly.. people tweeting about accidents on the way home, reviewing bands they saw last night, talking about things going on this weekend, discussing local issues (we’re in the middle of a gang war right now). All those tweets had some context and became a pretty glorious string of something I would call content.
It’s definitely making me think about how I use Twitter, and how I can add signal to the noise.
regarding point 9.
you mean your brother DIDN”T die in a horrible logging accident?
No, nor did a hod of cement drop from a construction site on to his head the precise NIGHT BEFORE my Women’s Studies final.
I know, I’m as shocked as you are.