Laying down a social marker
BrainJuicer’s Tom Ewing wrote a blog post today about how the way we listen to music could change.
He envisioned people will soon have “attention regimes, in the way they follow dietary regimes and exercise regimes, and will have them in public: a proclamation of one’s listening regime will become a kind of social marker”; adding:
“Demonstrating you can pay attention in a world of instant clicks will be a mark of presumed character (and bragging rights) in the same way demonstrating you keep fit in a world of chairs and screens is among white-collar workers now.”
Ephemerality is built into the internet.
If you don’t update your website Google will punish you by pushing you down its search rankings.
Fail to tweet for any extended period and people will unfollow you.
Don’t update your status and friends will accuse you of being a ‘Facebook lurker’.
The internet demands that we keep having opinions and we keep sharing them.
The image of ourselves we create online cannot be allowed to pass its sell-by-date.
It’s not enough to have written a series of original, thoughtful articles about a subject on a blog. We have to keep refreshing them and demonstrate that our ideas are evolving.
On Twitter, we feel compelled to keep sharing articles, even if we have nothing to add. We’re merely signalling to the world that we haven’t lost interest in a subject.
On LinkedIn, we need to keep making new connections to demonstrate our ‘network’ is growing.
In the process, however, we lose sight of the quality of the ideas we’re sharing, the value of the people we’re connecting to and the reasons why we started using these sites in the first place.
When the quantity of our activity surpasses the quality in importance, we ultimately fail in our endeavour to create the image we were once trying to cultivate.
The struggle to cope with the demand for the new is why sites like Brain Pickings have become so popular; the internet having also sparked a nostalgia for sharing quotes from dead authors whose opinions are allowed to stand still.
Like them, we shouldn’t be afraid to allow what we once said to continue to speak for what we still think.
I feel that the necessity for the continual updating on these social networking devices could lead to an ‘internet addiction’, which is already very present in our society today. We struggle to avoid the distractions, but they creep up on us when our friends start to make these comments to us, or our fear of being labeled a “facebook lurker” or we simply fear of losing followers. These distractions are starting to tear apart social links, when speaking to a friend or family member they are on their phone, updating their status to “Hanging out with _____”! When we feel we are connected online, we most likely are failing to support our real life connections, giving our world something to fear for.
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Thanks Gareth for the article. This is my first foray into the blog world and you have highlighted aspects that impact on the blog process. I wonder, if Dickens had been born in this time, would he have achieved the things he managed in the 1800’s. I guess, why you write is also central to the ideas you’ve presented. Thanks again
Jon
As a pioneer of the serial publication of narrative fiction and the master of episodic writing, I’d like to think he would have been as, if not more, successful in the blogging format (particularly as we’re seeing a return to the income inequalities and abuses of power so evident during the Victorian period).
Twitter is a waste of time. At least on a blog you can explore ideas. But interesting and true what’s been said above. Thanks for sharing.
True, you can explore at more length (wrote about that here actually: https://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/vine-sound-bites-and-our-obsession-with-brevity/) but I do think Twitter has its uses. Discovering interesting stuff that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise (particularly when I use multiple columns in a TweetDeck type tool) being the main one for me.
True, it makes it easy to pass information on. Yet many people use it for self promotion. On blogs you can have ideas more explored. But for passing on articles it is good, no doubt.
One thing that has always interested me about the Internet is that, as Ashana said, it’s just there. There’s a reason IT people call it “the cloud”. It looks like it’s there, in a way, it is there but when you reach out to touch it there’s nothing you can grab onto. It’s just servers and wires and nothing that makes any sense when looked at directly. What people think of as ‘The Internet’ is an emergent experience that society makes from all those servers networked together.
It’s fun sometimes to go and lay out on a hill and stare at the clouds. You can see shapes in them and use your imagination to make up stories about them. That’s also an emergent experience. However, if the clouds stand still, you can only see so many shapes before you get bored and do something else. The cloud must move and change. That was Arthur’s point, and he made it well.
But there’s more to it than that. I agree with you, Gareth, that Internet has changed the way humans operate as a society. The availability of information has shortened the “now”. Now, “old news” can be 20 minutes ago. That changed “now” has resulted in a change in how society views the concepts of static and dynamic.
The academic world has always operated in this manner. The phrase is “Publish or perish”. Produce ideas, good ideas worth of being shared among your colleagues, or face oblivion. The difference is that the academic world has much stricter (by some measures anyway) standards of what is worthy of being shared. The Internet doesn’t. But the internet has its own quality control system. Clicks and views and other such things. But since everyone can vote.what is good can vary by the hour.
This can work in your favor sometimes. Things can go viral years after they are published. Time isn’t always a factor. What you post today could be discovered two, three, five years from now. And not necessarily in a good way. Just because you can post, doesn’t mean you should. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
When you post, post well. How current your presence is doesn’t matter as much as you think. But what you write, how you represent yourself does. You hit the nail on the head, Gareth.
Thanks, Tug. Some perceptive points there. I think there’s an addiction to the statistical feedback (views, likes, tweets, etc) that drives us to keep our presence current too. Rob Horning has written a ton of interesting stuff on that subject on the New Inquiry site. This is particularly good if you haven’t read it: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hi-haters/
The internet makes no demands. It is just there. We are the ones making the demands. Human beings. We are the ones with the short attention spans, who choose to unfollow people who don’t post enough meaningless and boring nonsense, who criticize others for being Facebook “lurkers.” We are the problem.
Ephemerality is built into our very existence. Our tools simply mirror our realities.
Thanks for responding, Ashana. I am being slightly disingenuous here and have, on a number of occasions, criticised those who adopt a ‘digital dualist’ mentality (https://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/tag/digital-dualism/). I fully agree with your point that tools mirror our realities too.
Of course the internet isn’t a separate ‘thing’ as such, and it was created by humans, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge the fact sites are built to transmit the values and norms of other people (https://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/the-subtle-shaping-of-behaviour-and-norms/) and that it does impact our behaviour (https://precisebrandinsight.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/the-imperceptible-impact-of-social-media-on-our-everyday-lives/).
Michael Sacasas makes a strong argument here for continuing to question the impact of new technologies: http://thefrailestthing.com/2013/06/20/thinking-and-its-rhetorical-enemies/
thefrailestthing.com is a terrific blog in general and I’d thoroughly recommend following it if you don’t already.
But, hasn’t this really been true since the dawn of communication? When communication was “slow” and a message would take days to travel from one city to another, much less around the world, people made their “art” their “,ark” on the world in small ways over time and they were held up as geniuses by the masses. Today, the competition for attention is greater, as “everyone” has access to “everyone”. As it is, people tend to segregate themselves, and ‘follow’ the people that agree with them and their views.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. There will be less and less time spent enjoying one’s “15 minutes” of fame. Intelligence will probably decrease as the bar is lowered further and further to what is appropriate and allowable in ‘polite’ company. (Just saw a self-pic with a girl showing off her rear in an abortion clinic tweeting “about to get this abortion done”)
Information has become erratic and without limits, so there is no journalistic pride or tendency to report truth. Whatever you imagine and can post with a fun pic of cats in hats is what draws attention and is believed.
There will probably remain a select ‘elite’ few who control those who have given up on thought completely. Those select few will design the chains which drive us, the carrots which lead us, and the whips which drive us as it pleases them.
Can it be stopped? Sure. All we have to do is overcome human nature. Simple. 🙂
Thanks, Arthur – I enjoyed your response!
🙂
Reblogged this on Psyche's Circuitry and commented:
Another thought-provoking piece by Gareth Price about how the pressure to share via social media may be influencing the quality and quantity of our ideas.