as the rain pelts down on a rare saturday afternoon that i had actually made plans for, the somewhat understandable urge to further vent my spleen on a subject that’s been continually bothering me for a while now slowly transposes itself into print. immediately it occurs to me however, that writing this very post, sat alone at my computer perhaps undermines the point i will try and make, but fuck it - no one reads this shit anyway...
as the novelty of the iphone has long since worn off i now tend to keep my neck at an upright angle whilst moving around town, only to see much of the rest of the world staring back down at their little mini interactive TVs instead, much as i had previously.
granted, a lot of us on public transport not spasmodically tapping screens still often sit there with lost, vacant expressions of abject boredom anyway, but back to the point...
at the risk of sounding faintly whimsical, there’s truly something to be said for ‘unplugging’ every so often and simply observing/interacting with the world around you, without a soundtrack, and also without the need to share every thought, every fucking knee-jerk reaction that comes into your head with the rest of your social network(s) either.
the automatic response to share has, for this miffed chimp at least, clearly become a sickness of rather epidemic proportions.
sure, while the new-found ability to connect and share what you’re doing/thinking with the rest of the world has it’s positives (entertaining videos, news, events), more and more it feels that every time you log on to a network these days you’re confronted with a stream of pure, unadulterated, fucking noise, as if people have opened taps from their consciousness, cameras, or lonely youtube meanderings and plugged the stream straight into their computer.
and now for an equation officially known as the guff factor: people’s ability to process and produce more and more data in turn increases the amount of spam in a network, until it becomes almost pointless searching for something interesting. and what is interesting to me, maybe isn’t interesting to you (end sentence with public shrug).
so, how to filter such noise, whilst waiting for a ‘guff on/off’ option, and without deleting your social network account(s) in disgust and/or apathy?
although ‘discipline’ manages to sound pompous immediately, i’d love a pop-up on the odd occasion asking, “wait! are you sure anyone else gives a shit?” just before you post.
hiding people from our feeds is one option on some networks, but fails to address the problem on a larger scale - twitter being a case in point. this also assumes that all posts from the offender are banal, turd-on-paper offerings, which is maybe unfair....
if there is no real way to filter information, perhaps people will eventually react to the overload of data with antipathy, but ti reckon this is a long way off.
until then, think of me as a disinterested, passive observer...adrift at sea spitting and pissing pointlessly into the wind.
it’s always nice to end with a quote, my english teacher might have said once, so here’s a peach from Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter....
"Everybody is becoming like ... a Stasi agent, constantly observing himself or his friends."
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