The Nature of the Beast
I have begun writing this post five times so far. Sometimes I completed the first sentence, and sometimes I only got a few words in before hitting the backspace key. Perhaps the title of the post gives a clue to my indecision.
The “Beast” of the title refers to the social internet as a whole. I considered referring to the likes of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and Wordpress as some kind of Cerberus creature (the dog that guarded the gates of hell – also known as “Fluffy” in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), but Cerberus only had three heads. Perhaps Hydra would be a better analogy – the many headed serpent like creature of Greek mythology that grew new heads as you tried to dismember them.
Since lifting my entire online world in the air at the weekend, setting fire to vast swathes of it, renaming most of it, and cutting loose vast icebergs of content to slip beneath the internet's unforgiving waves, I have thought a lot about the various platforms, and how people use them – how I might want to use them.
Nothing is clear.
At one end of the spectrum we have Twitter, where anybody can stand on an imaginary soapbox and proclaim the mundane happenings of the day to the vast sea of people surrounding them. Nobody will be listening, but it will seem like you're a part of something bigger than yourself.
Next we have Tumblr, where the creatives of the world re-post each other's content in a swirling, self-replicating monster of gargantuan proportions. A small minority fight the Warholesque reblogging hell by posting continual photos of their face, their body, their pet dog, or their pet cat. Hundreds will click “heart” symbols, whose only real meaning seems to be “if I click this, will you visit my pile of borrowed rubbish and click it on mine too?”
Next up, Facebook, where the people you went to school with twenty years before will stalk you for the rest of time. Who knew that so much attention would be paid to the scrolling activity feed, watching every like button you click, every comment you post, and every page you frequent. You will spend hours tinkering with the security features in order to replicate the same experience as a paper diary passed between friends at the back of a classroom.
Livejournal will remind you that while the internet has moved on, people have not, and will not. The same narcissists that brought down websites fifteen years ago will operate to the same script today – signing up under multiple usernames, and starting arguments with themselves in order to draw others in, and to fan the flames. Somewhere amid the mayhem you will find interesting people though – although I suspect the only reason they still post to LiveJournal is because they cannot find a way out.
Google+ will remain hugely impressive, and curiously empty. You will have thousands of followers, and wonder who any of them are. If you mention anything about software development in a post, the entire staff of several software development sweat shops in the Indian subcontinent will add you to their “circles”.
You will sign up for “the next best thing” (recently “Ello”), and grow disenchanted with the tech journalists cliches and false hope. As each service dies, another two will rise from the surrounding ground.
Pinterest will serve as a pointless collection of things you didn't need to collect. Nirvana for obsessive compulsives, a wonderfully engineered rat-hole for the rest of the population. You will spend hours collating photos of comic book artwork, and remain the only person that has any clue the archive exists.
Instagram will remind you just how bad you have become at photography – opting to use your mobile phone even when an SLR is on hand, purely because a couple of button presses will turn a so-so photograph into filtered, cropped, colour balanced awesome. Man the toolmaker walking all over man the artist.
You will sign up with services such as Squarespace, and marvel at the tools that help design, craft, and polish your online presence – which you will then obsess over instead of writing anything, ever again.
Nothing is clear – no use case is persuasive – and yet we continue signing up, trying out, and pumping substandard content into the open sewers of the world wide web.