Technology

I can't help feeling as if I'm using technology incorrectly, but I don't like the direction it's going.  Look, I love being able to access information all the time, any time, from any computer.  I like being able to check in on people I know and find out about events.  I like being able to chat with people I know using this tool. I even like wasting a certain amount of time looking at funny pictures.

But I strongly dislike the move toward incredibly tiny thoughts and re-posted images.  The internet ought to give us a platform to have BIGGER ideas - space is meaningless here, and access is comparatively egalitarian.  That we have hamstrung our culture into making everything into abbreviations and hashtags and 140 characters - it's such an arbitrary limit, and it's becoming de rigueur.  I'm not advocating total abandonment of the twitter platform, but it's as if we are voluntarily choosing to eat only 100 calorie snack packs for the rest of our lives.  Is that really satisfying?

The re-posted images sort of gets me, too.  It's like we're all back to playing that chain letter game, only it's a link we pass on, and we don't even think about it.  Go create some content!  I'm not a huge fan of people who take pictures of their meals but at least that's something new out there.

It can be argued that our human attention span is what's driving this abbreviated virtual lifestyle.  But that's backwards.  In weight-lifting, you never increase your muscle ability until you push it to fail: only by trying to do more than we can and failing can we do more than we did.  So if we only lift the things we can carry, we'll never be able to lift anything larger, ever.  In the same way, if you cater to the short attention span, you keep it small and restless.

But this shortness, this rapid fire, this smallness, it's so pervasive that I started this entry out with the phrase: I'm using technology incorrectly.  I don't want to flip that and say that everyone else is using it incorrectly.  It will be more accurate to say that we are narrowing our vision of a medium that could be anything, could encompass anything.