I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least affect them).
Leo Laporte got this stream of thought flowing on Sunday when he complained about Buzz (and the ephemerality of microblogging in general). For two weeks, nobody noticed that his posts weren’t getting through to Twitter. Here’s one of the money quotes (in case you missed it):
I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void… How demoralizing.
I had the same sort of awakening once, about a year ago: looked at my Twitter profile and saw that two weeks of updates were gone. For a second I was like, “Oh God…” until I realized how little was lost. Nothing, really. So I took a break, re-calibrated my centre of gravity and managed to keep a modest balance ever since: taking advantage of Twitter’s benefits without getting yanked into [too m]any hedonic black holes.
This kind of semi-crisis happens (I imagine) to virtually everyone who works and lives this much online. Robert Scoble went through a similar process last year… And here we are again. Paul Carr put it in (what I think are more widely and deeply compelling) terms of giving up too much of our life stories:
… for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having “woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands” – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.
Scott Rosenberg reiterated the same concerns, addressing a specific social network that might “know” more about us than we do, and is keeping it that way:
Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.
But I wouldn’t say everything is lost. At least nothing worth keeping…
Part of the problem might be our obsession with efficiency, and our innate aversion to loss. The Web turns thoughts and remarks into discrete, measurable objects. We never missed them much till we could pin them down and count them. We see the theoretical capacity — the Internet can store everything — so we’re inclined to feel that it should be used to its fullest. But nature has plenty of redundancies and processes that go on wastefully, or uselessly for long stretches. Plenty that dies too. Evolution wouldn’t work if everything lived forever. Sucks but that’s how it is. Same with creativity…
My own solution is to think about “inter-temporal sharing” as much as I think about social sharing. In other words, I’m filtering the present for the future, rather than insisting every check-in and tweet be saved for posterity. I’m sharing more links through Delicious — which I can export and keep on my own computer — than I do through Twitter.
You might say that’s more like “saving” than “sharing,” but isn’t saving essentially like sharing something with your future self?
[If you're interested in the theory side of this, read your Harold Innis on temporal and spatial biases. Note: I use "spatial bias" in a completely different way, more consistent with psychology than medium theory. Hat tip to Edward Comor at UWO for re-acquainting me with Innis's ideas. Also see #9 on Tim Carmody's excellent piece on 10 Reading Revolutions.]
Last year I wrote about this in response to some fears about “digital sharecropping“; I advocated thinking of it as an ongoing education and actively taking ownership of it:
Most obviously, there are opportunities for artists, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs, etc., to nurture projects and enterprises that support our offline endeavours…
Of more universal value is our emerging ability to take responsibility for our own continuing education, and in the process — unlike in the past when “self-teaching” meant being socially isolated, with little to show for one’s labour — we can cultivate relationships and representations (i.e. measurable accomplishments) that allow us to actually use what we’ve learned.
Instead of asking how a link or remark will be received by your friends and followers within the next hour, ask yourself how it will be received by you in the future: Is it likely to be signal or noise?
To do that you need to have a sense of purpose and a mindset aimed at building something, which I think is good in itself, not merely a technique for improving the quality of the content you share. After a while this investment starts to pay off: it becomes the future, and when you’re feeling like you’re not getting enough value from the ephemeral web you can find meaning and relevance in the stocks you’ve been investing in and refining, “sharing with yourself” and turning into enduring objects over time.
Ideally, it won’t be entirely selfish. See the interesting discussion at the Lifestream Blog about changing value propositions and approaches to sharing our “likes.”
Instead of damning or resenting the mob and its whims, understand that we’re each partly responsible for those whims, and if we make an extra effort to exercise better judgement and think about investing our attention over the long term, we should find that we’re building things with our friends instead of helping each other spin the treadmill so fast that people have to jump off.
P.S. Any suggestions for tools? I use Instapaper and I’ve tried Evernote but it never quite clicked with me. My main “tool” is blogging about things and starting to tell stories while they’re still fresh…
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