Only As Useful As Those Who Use It
I’ve finally decided to write about a trend I noticed long ago but hoped might subside. I’m really interested in the multitude of social networking sites, platforms, and applications that have been released. I’m especially interested in seeing what other people are doing and reading online. I’ve enjoyed my time on Twitter and Tumblr. Problem is, I’ve never been able to get more than one or two people to sign up for these services with me. I’ve basically been Tweeting at myself for the last year on Twitter and posting Tumblr stories that I don’t know if anyone’s reading. Why do I do it? Not sure. I just hope that if I keep up with it other people might get interested and decide to join. It hasn’t proved very useful.
The people I want to follow are my friends and colleagues, but nobody is interested in these services. Instead people like me are left tracking folk we don’t necessarily have an investment in and basically talking to ourselves. Is there something about these services that fill a void in my life that other people have filled already? Most of my friends aren’t “all up on technology” so it’s not surprising. Is there something narcissistic about all this? It was a question raised in one of my classes recently. I’m inclined to just shoot it down, until I compare myself to my friends. Or is there something about my desire to read other people’s items that somehow validates all this?
Google just announced a new feature in Google Reader in which your friends’ shared items are made available for you to check out in your own Reader. Pretty cool, assuming your friends first have a Gmail account, and know what RSS is, and subscribe to anything to read, and share items as well. It’s an awesome feature assuming you know people who care.
Kevin said:
Dec 15, 07 at 1:08 pmI feel like I should speak to this a bit. Much of this technology - from organizing one’s RSS feeds to posting intermittent messages about what one does during the day - can be seen as a nuisance. I think about many of these new “features” in terms of whether or not they will a) actually save me any time, in any real or identifiable way or b) will actually expand the breadth of my useful knowledge. I can almost always answer the first part with “No, it won’t.” I only really read two condensed, specialty news sites (http://www.aldaily.com, http://www.artsjournal.com), have a few condensed feeds on a Netvibes page (but rarely use these) and use two newspaper/news sites. I think that Digg is cumbersome and not the way that I want to spend my time. As to expanding my knowledge, well, I’m sure that some of these services could help better connect me to my friends and my friends to the world at large, but the utter diversity of mine and my friends interests would make it a bit of a mess. Plus, this would work more toward ruining one of the unique pleasures of the online world, which is the interpersonal communication which results from that specific news story, article, or LOLcatz picture that you point your friend to. If its assumed or taken for granted that everybody sees and shares everything they read (and with Twitter, everything that they do), that specificity loses its context and is devalued.
This isn’t all to say that I don’t find some new technologies useful. But I largely steer clear. Another reason has to do with memory. One reason that I avoid making an awesome, megacondensed RSS feed list is that I like the aleatory and unpredictable nature of my web browsing. I like forgetting about certain sites for certain periods of time and then coming back to them with lots of new content. I like trying to remember to see how many of my favorite sites and news sources I can read before resulting to bookmarks. Since I don’t regularly listen to podcasts (another thing that I never really got into, because I prefer music in almost all situations) I’m not missing too much. In short, I like to keep my technology a bit human amidst the controls.
All the things you mention have their uses for the right people. I’m not the right person for most of them. I can appreciate their innovation but realize that they don’t serve any of my purposes. With the internet as big and disorienting as it is, I’d rather continue to keep my stake within myself and not projected out through these technologies.
Bobby said:
Dec 16, 07 at 10:16 pmAfter all these years I’ve decided that I don’t really like getting lost on the Internet. I enjoy a good link given to me by a friend or linked somewhere on Digg, but rarely do I browse the rest of the site. I enjoy my RSS feeds because they allow me to keep tabs on what I have and haven’t read on the many sites I frequent. A lot of what I read is tech and gaming news and at least 300 articles come across my screen a day in those two categories. Sure, I skip a lot of them as I rip through my Google Reader, but at least the process is streamlined. If I don’t add a feed to my reader, chances are I will almost never remember to visit that site ever again. I also like getting stories as they come along because it allows me to comment in a timely manner if I so choose.
Anyway, I do see how it’s not useful for a lot of people. Thing that sucks is that people like me who find it really interesting are left talking to ourselves, as I said. I’d love to know what stories people find interesting during the day — especially when not everybody is signed onto whatever IM program they use. The number of times I’ve thought, “damn’t where’s Kevin, this link is good!” is staggering. (Oh, and the rest of you people too.)
I also mention this because a lot of the people in the tech world don’t stop to think about the average Internet user. The average Internet user has no idea how to use Twitter, has no idea what BitTorrent does, and doesn’t know what RSS means. These people aren’t dumb or technophobes. They just don’t care. Talking to my girlfriend in the car this afternoon she expressed the same sentiment as Kevin. “If I care about somebody I’ll send them an e-mail.” Problem is, people rarely do that.I find micro-updates are useful because you can quickly send off information without formality–the formality that often prevents people from taking the time to send those e-mails that they swear they’ll send but they never do.
I don’t mean to rail against anybody. “If it’s not for you, it’s not for you.” I just wish it were!