Then someone else worrying about the nature of his own tweets, compared to the blogposts he used to write. While his former blog read as a diary -an external memory-, the chronology of tweets offered at best a fractured, incomprehensive and utterly useless list of seemingly random quotes (rephrasing and exaggerating a tad here...). Had he been wasting his time microblogging?
And then there's the 'outsourcing of memory through Google' that I wrote about in my last post. I've heard this before. When printing was invented, pessimists predicted that it would be the end of human kind as we knew it. People would become lazy and dumb because they would no longer have the need to remember or recall. Before long, they wouldn't memorise anything anymore and their brains would shrivel.
For a few years, I've used Flickr as an emotional diary. Pictures speak a lot of words, you know... I was into a few hobbies that were easy to catch in images and evoked reactions from likeminded people. We felt connected through these images, captions, tags, comments & faves.
Then I started using blogging alongside to Flickr, because some work-related stuff was more suitable for posts. Again, there was a community of people that shared information and opinions through comments, blogrolls & trackbacks.
I've stopped blogging the way I did when I started checking and doublechecking whether somebody else had already blogged about this new thing. Twitter has neatly filled this space. Anything new is on there within a minute of publication elsewhere in the world. It's kind of an express RSS-feed, a digital marquee. And I don't feel the need to be the first to announce the news anymore so I'm more a consumer than a producer on Twitter :). Moreover, tweets are disposable. If I want to keep a link someone tweeted, I keep it somewhere else - not by retweeting it. I never look back.
Like everybody else, I started using Facebook as well. Now here I am a true prosumer. Facebook has gradually become the emotional diary of choice for me, with things like Flickr, YouTube, blogposts, events & links coming together. And here I DO look back, my notes, links and embedded clips neatly stored chronologically. Everybody has their own 'blog' on Facebook and the 'home' setting acts like an RSS-reader of sorts.
I don't really care if I miss anything. Important issues will inevitably come to me sooner or later. My contacts are my filter on the world. Their interests and daily doings are reflected on my screen. We are connected in many ways. Even with the ones I know IRL, there's an extra connectiveness.
And then I felt the urge to start blogging again. I needed my own emotional diary again. If I don't blog for a week, nobody will notice and that doesn't bother me. I'm still visible elsewhere. This is MY space.
picture: British Library, London
