Why do I care that you’re having brunch at some hotel? Why do I care that you just planted some strawberries? Or that you had an idea while you’re on the toilet?
I only care if I’m participating in those activities somehow with you. If I’m thinking about brunch, too. Or if I’m playing Farm the Strawberries with you. Or talking to you on the phone while you’re having the genius idea on the toilet.
Otherwise, it’s just spam. Empty brain carbs.
Here’s an example of a daily thought I have:
“Great, I get 50% off for a high end massage services that I don’t need. But it’s such a good deal so I should spend the money that I wouldn’t have budgeted anyways! Thanks Groupon!”
When are we, as users, going to start self-curating ourselves? Because these products aren’t going to do it. Facebook and Twitter and Google and Groupon aren’t going to build tools that will allow you to slow down and think more and publish and use stuff that are actually worthwhile. The Internet model is based on sharing. And sharing in tech means more data. The more data is out there, the more machines can do something useful or interesting with it.. or just new. Machines, people, technology and new products have to justify their existence. Getting you to input new things and publish new data is what the model is concerned about because all they’re concerned about is growth. It doesn’t matter if those things are useful or good or relevant.
The old assumption is that growth justifies the value of something. If something is good, it evolves and survives and grow. That simply isn’t true. Lots of bad shit grows too - look at Big Oil. And worse, lots of not-bad-but-not-good stuff sees high growth too.. it’s these kinds of things, the vapid, useless things, that clogs up our systems and damages the growth of the good stuff.
On a larger scale, that’s how human civilization has operated for millenniums. We’re a productivity-based race - we borrow so that we can not deal with that tricky problem of resource scarcity in the present, so that we can invest in capital expenditures for new projects, new research and findings. But the model isn’t sustainable because essentially we’re borrowing from the future to spend on the present, and when the things we create aren’t useful, aren’t relevant any longer, the model goes to shit. We track GDP but we don’t really track if all the things we’re producing are useful.
So I’m going to try something. I’m going to disconnect my Tumblr feed from Facebook, disconnect Twitter from Facebook, turn off Places, Farmville and all the other types of things that I can publish… I’m going to experiment with using Facebook as if they had stripped it down to what it really ought to be, a place for real friends to hang out and have conversations. Conversations that are human and two way and about the things we’re actually doing offline, things that we find are interesting and useful. So what’s important? Photos. Announcements. Direct messages. Perhaps links as references for actual conversations.
But that’s it. I’m going to self-edit and curate my own stream, clean up the people that I actually want to have conversations with on Facebook and see what happens. I’m going to see if you can have a sustainable media model online. Oh hello user-generated content – meet user-curated content.