Ben Grosser thinks that
platforms embed within us the idea that our own sociality is best evaluated and understood through quantity. They reconfigure our sense of time in ways that can make minutes or hours ago seem old. And their personalized feeds teach our brains that the only content worth watching or reading is that which we can already imagine.
Enter Minus – a social network where users get only 100 posts—for life.
John Naughton in The Guardian has a few choice words on Mark Zuckerberg’s recent “Memo to All”:
Dearly beloved, our reading this morning is taken from the latest Epistle of St Mark to the schmucks – as members of his 2.3 billion-strong Church of Facebook are known. The purpose of the epistle is to outline a new “vision” that St Mark has for the future of privacy, a subject that is very close to his wallet – which is understandable, given that he has acquired an unconscionable fortune from undermining it.
The rest of the story here.
I read John’s blog assiduously. You might enjoy it too.
Twitter will suggest that you listen to people who listen to each other. Amazon will suggest that you read something very much like what you just read. Even your search engine will try to make sure that you get results that are similar to the ones you clicked on last time. If you go with the flow, you’ll end up hearing the same narrow view recycled repeatedly – yet you’ll think you did your due diligence.
Don’t fool yourself.
Gather information from those who do not communicate with one another. In fact, you want to gather information from entire networks that do not communicate with one another. Truly rich and diverse information comes only when you hear, separately and independently, from “worlds” that do not overlap: from different parts of the earth, different economic sectors, different social demographics, different religions, languages, ideologies and cultures.
What I want is to be creative. I want the tools to serve me, not the other way around.
I’m getting absolutely nothing significant done, but I’m supposedly “busy” all the time. And it’s all driven by a shared anxiety: if we don’t keep up, we’ll be left behind; if we don’t flock over here with the Crowd, we’ll lose our audience and no one will talk to us or listen to us anymore.
We’re not so sure they’re listening now…maybe we’d better issue another Tweet or Post or Dent and make sure they’re there.
(Source: cassandrapages.com)
Most people struggle to kill their accounts permanently. Like a bad high school romance, we break up with Facebook, only to flirt and make up, and then break up again.
This begins to make sense when we realize that Facebook has become a prosthetic of our memory.
But not just a prosthetic of memory in general, a simple list on a scrap of paper is that much; it is a prosthetic of our autobiographical memory. It’s a part of our identity, and it is very difficult to kill off a part of one’s self.
¿A cuánta gente estamos dejando de conocer ahora que tenemos a todo el mundo al alcance de un clic? Nunca hemos estado más conectados, y desconectados. Nunca hemos tenido más amigos, y menos. Nunca hemos sabido de tantas personas, tan poco.
En el mundo virtual que he creado soy simpático, me lo paso en grande, viajo a lugares fascinantes y tengo cientos de amigos a quienes al parecer gusta lo que hago, quizá porque ya no tienen que hacer el esfuerzo de decírmelo. Basta con un clic.
Internet nos permite presentar una versión mejorada de nosotros mismos. La cuidamos cada día, la exponemos en el escaparate virtual y esperamos que se paren a admirarla. ¿Por qué arriesgarse a ponerla bajo la prueba del contacto directo y real?
Nunca estuvimos más acompañados. Ni más solos.
via davidjimenezblog.
Celui d’une civilisation où on n’existe que si l’on est médiatisé.
Prémisse: Je n’existe que si les autres le savent.
His plan was to show his coworkers just how dependent they really were on e-mail, emphasizing how many times a day they were compelled to check it, and proving that it was no longer a productivity tool, but a procrastinator’s best friend. One Man’s Vision of a Social Workplace.
Read this story.
