Tweeting ourselves to death

Check out this brief news article.  The Archbishop of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has gone “on record” with concerns about online social networking.  The article is a bit useless – it is too short and offers no context for his comments (was it a speech, an interview, something else?).  It probably grabs a headline simply because a prominent person (ie. a person with an impressive sounding title) registers some opposition to a phenomenon that only appears to gather more speed everyday – and which all media outlets would love to tap somehow to garner advertising revenue from.

However, I think his Grace (or whatever you’re supposed to call him), is really on the money.  (Figurally, that is.  I can’t imagine his comments will garner him any advertising revenue).  Community is not online.  You can network online, but it’s not really social in the full sense either.  The Archbishop’s comments are quite subtle too – it is not even that mediatised communication replaces other forms of social interaction, but rather they become the standard for social interaction.  The full richness of friendship is lost.

Says he with a blog.  Excuse me while I go text my wife that I love her.

Filed under: Blogging, experiences, media, technology , community, friendship, media advertising, online community, social costs of online technology, social networking

Forgive the indecision

I’m finding it hard to be satisfied with the templates on WordPress.  At the same time, I don’t know enough to implement changes I’d like to the various frames that are provided.  Some templates have structural elements that I like, but are in a colour scheme that is just yuck.  So, I’ve gone for something simple, and I’ll try and stick to it!

Filed under: Blogging, Uncategorized , blog design, wordpress themes

On Archiving One’s Self

I love the Spring weather.  So fresh, so bright, the warmth taking you by surprise, luscious greens after Winter browns and greys.  It makes you feel younger, vibrant, fresh and capable.  It is a time for enthusiasm.  In my house, at least, that means the proverbial Spring cleaning really does happen.  Although not in one go, but more a sustained effort as the season progresses.

As part of this, there is the inevitable culling of all of the junk one has managed to accumulate over the preceding months.  This is necessary, otherwise you turn into a nostalgic hoarder, keeping every scrap of paper or plastic piece of rubbish that has crossed your path, because someday, some way, it may prove useful, or meaningful, or some such thing.

Increasingly though, the things one collects are digital.  I no longer add to my photo’s in boxes; they are now collected on an external hard-drive.  Bankstatements and other files, where possible, are pdfs.  But, as a corollary, I now have obsolete pieces of electronic equipment to throw out: rather than turf the content of the archive, I discard the archive itself.  And to clean up a hard drive, all one does is hit the delete key.

What is contained on these various electronic gizmos is, in a way, me.  In a curious fashion, I am the contents of my mobile phone, its list of contacts, my memory card full of digital photographs and videos, my list of Facebook friends, my blog.  In ways that were inconceivable a century, even fifty years ago, I now leave digital, non material, traces of myself everywhere. I am… a cyborg.

In an important sense, things have not changed qualitatively since early humans left footprints, painted on the walls of caves, scratched the bark of trees.  In a very general sense, we could call these things a kind of “writing” – an inscription that left a trace that could be read by another of the same ilk.

But I do wonder what has changed with these developments.  Our ideas about ourselves and the world respond to the our environment – they do not have an independent existence, autonomous and free of all empirical trappings, dirty bodies and fleshly marks.  Our minds are embedded in the world around us.  Does the ability to so easily tap delete effect the way we view life?  Does the massive archiving of one’s self that one undertakes on a blog, or Facebook or with a digital camera change the way in which we treat ourselves?  And how can we tell the difference?  And, given that archives are intimately caught up with the way we see the past, and therefore the future, too, what does this do to our sense of time?

Filed under: Blogging, experiences, random thoughts, technology , archives, Blogging, facebook, self identity, technology, temporality