April 3, 2010
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A rant about facebook and the timelessness of your updates
God, all this Data is so ephemeral.
Today I am doing the Good and Responsible Thing, which is taking all my precious data- my precious pictures, my precious word files- from my horrifically unstable and frighteningly unreliable laptop hard drive, and copying it to my… portable hard drive. Which I generally keep in my nightstand not one foot away from my laptop.
Ah yes its all very secure now. I suppose if I wanted to be really safe I could just pay someone on the Internet dollar amounts a month to hold all my precious things for me. Yes, let me put all my things in the Cloud where no harm can come to them.
I wonder about everyone’s tweets, and facebook status messages, and profile pictures uploaded from cell phones that are broadcast and then trickle lower down on the newsfeed and then disappear. Are these thoughts that we simply would have kept to ourselves had we not been given a particular 140 character platform in which to air them? Or would those little grains or half formed thoughts have eventually grown up into a fully formed blog or essay or thesis if it had been forced to stew and develop before it could be translated into a format suitable for disseminating to all our friends?
Does it seem like no one is writing anymore? Could it possibly be true that we really were just blogging to let friends and family know how we are and now Facebook does that well enough? Or did we somehow outgrow our navel gazing? (at 26?)
Actually, I blame facebook anyway. You can’t have so many sites anymore. Before there were many sites, but now every site needs everyone to be on it to be of any use at all. Who can be bothered to check both myspace and facebook? And why blog on xanga when none of your friends are on xanga? It used to be that people would be willing to go to different sites, but now every site worth its salt can feed you information from every other site. (And indeed, theoretically this xanga entry will be posted to facebook when I am finished with it.)
But facebook is shit for blogging. Sure you get “notes”. “Notes” in their tiny little boxes with their itty bitty titles. Notes that make three sentences feel look like you’ve written a dissertation already. And formatting! Fuck formatting.
But of course, the worst part is that when you are done the note just shows up as another “item” in your feed, another blip on your activity radar, after the picture you posted of yourself eating great chicago style pizza and before the fact that you became a fan of “Narrating to yourself as you walk down the street”.
Facebook is not a place for art (graffiti non-withstanding). Say what you want about myspace, there was an art to it. Comments, blogs (blogs, not notes), and personal information all had big, wide boxes, and nearly everything on the page could be customized to your liking. Obviously scene kids abused their ability to choose fonts and background images and decorated their space- THEIR space!- to the point of illegibility. Ugh, and the loud music that would begin to play the instant the page loaded- so annoying!
But Goddamn facebook and its wide white open spaces, its tiny stupid boxes everywhere, its total lack of customization. We will have our thoughts in the formats Facebook, in its wisdom, wanted us to have them. We can only be grateful that now we don’t have to have them in the third person anymore. (Remember “Jimmy is taking a shower”, “Jimmy is new in town”?). We will have our thoughts in a way that is as short and as bland as possible, and those thoughts will be disseminated among random (I think) “friends”, to peruse at their leisure, or not. Certainly no one is producing things on facebook that anyone would care to download, print screen, or-god forbid- print on paper. Certainly no one is putting all those endless days of thoughts onto an external hard drive for posterity.
Is paper, in its burnable, tearable fragility really any better for posterity than my portable hard drive or gmail account? And were the things we wrote down on paper any more significant than our tweets and updates? Has quick and dirty communication dumbed down the things we say, or simply allowed us to be less choosy?
Perhaps it is just as well that we are not saying much, since I think it is fairly clear that none of it will be visible to future generations. Even the things that aren’t simply cleared off of far away servers when all the adclick funds dry up may not make any sense to our children and grand children. There is no “interface” for paper. If it survives, you can just look at it and obtain all of its information. But, what are they to do if they don’t have CD drives, USB ports, or even… the Internet?
Currently, in my closet I have a box of very well-preserved cassette tapes of all kinds of things. And no fucking walkman.
