I’m sure there must be some kind of odd cosmic alignment going on today, whose most unfortunate side effects on planet Earth have undoubtly manifested as the sudden unavailability of Twitter and extreme slugginesh of services like Flickr and de.licio.us.
If you add to this the apocalyptic amount of white noise generated by yesterday’s release of the latest Apple gadgets, what you get is an eerie, almost numb feeling, like the whole internet instantly fell silent.
Blogs are still there, of course, as are Facebook, myspace and other self contained experiences… but they suddenly seem to me like quickly aging pictures hung on the walls of our mindscape: they stay there, silently displaying their more or less colorful message to those who take the effort of taking a glance at (i.e. devote their attention to) them, but without filling up the air…
Some, like Facebook for instance, are like hatchlings of new media to come, info-caterpillar waiting to fully grow up and explode into a cognitive epiphany. Others, like personal blogs, seem like aristocratic statements of stubborn individuality: piercing, precise, if somehow slow.
Amazing, isn’t it? If only somebody told me, just two years ago, that I’ll ever call blogs a “slow media”… go figure.
And, by the way, this is just a snapshot of my current, intimate feeling, so don’t take it personally: I’m sure other people (maybe less exposed to networks or, on the other hand, more immersed in new communication experiences, or just taking a different approach to them) will have different perceptions and therefore opinions…
but the lines above describe where I stay now, contemplating how fascinating is that by gradually loosing structure and seriousness, we’re also recovering (more and more) the aural form of communication over the visual: once again, and (maybe more surprisingly) despite written words being still the main vessel of content.
P.S.: the photo above is from a wonderful workshop on Dead Media by Thomas Purves I attended at LIFT 07, where we discussed some of these same concept from a different perspective.
Per me e’ solo stata una giornata rilassante e sono felice di aver visto la rete solo di sfuggita =)
;)
As I’ve always stated, we need a personal (aristocratic) but networked (social media) structure.
That is, exactly like people. :)
But we already discussed this, we’re a bit on stall. :P
I’ve got to add a consideration: slow doesn’t mean “bad”, in any way. Slow and Fast must coexist (exactly like personal/social, aristocratic/popular), the issue is to allow them to merge.
I’ve a fixed image in my mind: an artist, alone in his studio, drawing beautiful scenes, and the same artist, at a party, socializing. :)
Thanks for the kind words Riccardo.
I’ve been wondering about the silence of the net myself recently
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/07/31/has-facebook-killed-blogging/
We talked about at that same workshop that the rise of social presence (facebook and twitter etc.) would have to obsolesce or replace something and that blogging must be on that list of threatened media.
so it seems to be happening.
@Folletto: I didn’t say that slow is bad. Slow is just that: slow.
What hit me though is that just a couple of years ago I considered blogs to be the vessels of a major acceleration in media (compared, for instance, with traditional journalism)… and now they appear bulky if compared to microblogging dynamics. It’s just amazing.
@Thomas: precisely, threatened in the shape we used to know, at least. An interesting exercise will be keeping an eye open for what does this trend retrieve and what does it reverse