stickybuffalo may be in a persistent vegetative state, but the patient hasn’t expired yet. now seems like an opportune moment to reflect on the future: of this site, of weblogs, of the internet.
it would be easy to blame the total posting blackout in here on facebook. and that’s exactly what i’m going to do. unfair, maybe, in that it’s not like this place was exactly blowing up at any point in 2009, and our posting history was spotty long before the rise of social media. but speaking for myself (and i don’t know if you guys would say the same, but i’m guessing you would) anything i might have posted in here five years ago now ends up in facebook, twitter, flickr, group emails, or web forums. for the most part i’ve been content to let third parties handle my mental output to the web, since they made it so easy, and made it possible for me to share with a very specific and self-selected audience.
they did it so well, in fact, that i now post a lot more than i ever had before: i read more, i read more widely, i respond more. more importantly, i’ve been forced to economize the way i post. OK, admittedly this post is not a good demo of my newfound brevity, but it’s an improvement — god only knows how many draft sb posts never saw the light of day because they ran to tens of thousands of words and i couldn’t find a way to end them. trying to post in 140 characters or less has been painful, but badly needed, therapy. i’m gradually learning facebook manners, and even more gradually, how to modulate my crackpot rhetoric for a room full of polite acquaintances and distant relatives who may not see the world as i do. i like the way social media have brought people into network culture who never would have gotten here otherwise, people in my parents’ generation, and people a little bit closer to the outer margins of computer literacy and network access. i like the idea of having a basically genial, mostly imaginary connection with people whose paths i’ve crossed over the years, superficial though it may be, the same way i like being on a first-name, two-minute-driveway-chat basis with my next door neighbors. it’s all good — i like all this stuff.
still, something has been lost. sometimes 140 characters isn’t enough. sometimes you want to fire off a diatribe or a halfbaked thought without having to set up individual permissions for each post (i.e. hide this from elderly relatives, coworkers, teabaggers and suspected teabaggers, and people who don’t recognize simpsons references). you want a venue where your nonsense ideas and immoderate tone are going to be more or less expected by anybody who has managed to navigate there. twitter still feels like it offers some of that freedom — anyway, of the people i know offline who’ve discovered twitter and decided to follow me, none of them are people i can’t comfortably speak my mind in front of — but the chilling effect will set in sooner or later.
and of course there’s the already extensively documented fact that facebook is, well, evil — and getting eviler by the day. the latest round of privacy shenanigans may have gone too far, and the backlash is gathering steam with louder calls for an open alternative. while it’s not clear what that would look like (these whippersnappers are working on some sort of p2p version of a social network that sounds kind of exciting), singel’s vision involves a return to private user-controlled domains that would be linked up via free or ad-supported networking tools:
Think of being able to buy your own domain name and use simple software such as Posterous to build a profile page in the style of your liking. You’d get to control what unknown people get to see, while the people you befriend see a different, more intimate page. They could be using a free service that’s ad-supported, which could be offered by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, a bevy of startups or web-hosting services like Dreamhost.
“Like” buttons around the web could be configured to do exactly what you want them to — add them to a protected profile or get added to a wish list on your site or broadcast by your micro-blogging service of choice. You’d be able to control your presentation of self — and as in the real world, compartmentalize your life.
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/#ixzz0ndS7v0V1
if there’s anything to this idea, and i hope there is, then maybe there’s a reason for a site like stickybuffalo to continue to exist. obviously, whatever we thought we were doing here back in web 1.0 days — some sort of zine, an attempt to reach an audience of some kind, a showcase for ideas & opinions that were nowhere near as important or compelling as we supposed — is no longer a going proposition. but maybe there’s a home for sb in the post-facebook internet: i like to think we could maintain the site as a sort of overflow bucket for thoughts longer than 140 characters, or content too hot for facebook, or whatever. no guilt associated with posting silence, since there’d be no expectation of an audience checking sb on a regular basis, but if someone did post here it would show up in people’s twitter streams, RSS feeds, etc…
the question, then, is what kinds of resources we’d need to plug into a more distributed social network, and we might have to wait a bit for that picture to take shape. in the meantime, i’m going to work on upping my output in general, and try to post in here instead of in other places. i’m also going to consider killing my facebook identity altogether.
what do you guys think?
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