Recently I’ve taken stock of my online habits and how they square with my offline self; do they mirror each other? A trend has surfaced in the past couple of years about the way I socialize, search and consume, and not surprising, my online behaviors have started to follow my offline preferences.
One of the great joys about living in urban areas is the random discoveries that come with the density. They make up for the persistent pee smell and sounds of rat footsteps through the night.
In Manhattan and Brooklyn, it was the little places tucked away where I carried my fondest memories: the underground sake bars, speakeasies, noodle joints and performance spaces. My consumption of these intense small social spaces carried over to the Bay Area, where mixology dives, taquerias, book stores and wine bars held their secrets in the most unassuming of places: the alleyways, the fog-laden districts, the dark cellar in the ghetto.
The popular online thing right now is broadcasting. We flickr we twitter we facebook – we atomize our identity into these bits of data and information and then, whether because of narcissism or a desire for group-think or a delusion for creativity, we push our fragmented identities into the ether. (I’m sure there are less cynical reasons.. )
The really cool thing about these mediums is that they deconstruct and then re-constitute our fragmented identities. My tweet during Obama’s inauguration is part of a larger stream of thoughts from around the world, my flickr photos flow into streams where other people will change its context and meaning through their comments – all those atomic activities become part of the larger whole, a new object, crowd-sourced and crowd created. Witness Wikipedia or OSM or anything that have popped up in the recent years.
Why did I bring this up? Because I’m having a reaction. It’s like eating too much ice cream. At some point, I’m starting to feel like there’s too much broadcasting for the sake of publication and the value of those broadcasts is lost. There’s a current trend on Facebook to write 25 things about yourself. It’s a viral thing – a throwback to the email chain letters of the early nineties – but to me, it’s the encapsulation of how self-broadcasting ultimately becomes an exercise in vapid sharing.
I consume way too much content that I didn’t actively explore or really find all that interesting. Most of my RSS feeds are vestiges of a passing interest. They lie idle, unread. How on earth can 500 followers be useful? If someone has 500 followers on Twitter, it means they’re using it as a marketing tool, a distribution channel. Why do I need to know 25 inane things about you? Just because I’m signed on as a connection to someone doesn’t mean I’m interested in everything that person chooses to broadcast.
Don’t market to me. Talk to me.
It’s the communities that are going on in the electronic alleys that I find valuable. It’s those places where I can catch my breath, unplug from all the information overload, and recharge with real conversations. Whatever happened to exploration? Where are the tools to explore, to find the hidden niches on the web where real stuff is being created?
I love the idea of travel. The best part of traveling for me are the same things – the insights that comes from active exploration of events and happenings that are beyond the pale of normal experiences. Instead, we’re devolving online during the Web 2.0 world much in the same way as the TV age – we sit back, consume content that is blasted out and are impressed upon us.
Perhaps with the growth of online communities, it’s time to look into the secret societies as well.