Listening at the Stream of the Fire Hose
May 15th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve spent the past few days offline, more or less, and I can say that I’ve enjoyed my time away from the constant stream of emails, Tweets, text messages and comments.
There were moments I felt disconnected, but I never really felt like I was missing out on anything because I was poking around in real life.
But it’s been hard to get back into the technology. I’ve lost my footing with Twitter, emails are piling up in my box and even sitting in front of my RSS Reader — trying to prepare my blog — has been hard.
The noise factor online is too much for me to handle with the realities of my life at the moment. The constant whir of friends and casual friends and online friends became overwhelming, so I shut down completely.
Now, I’m trying to find my way back in (because you miss five days, you miss a lot).
Then I stumbled across this: Learning to listen - the ‘quiet revolution’ that is social media.
One of the grand mistakes of social media and computer-mediated technology is that we have to be active engagers all the time, otherwise we won’t build up enough traffic, attract enough eyeballs and become a supernode.
And becoming a supernode is the name of the game.
There’s a process for doing that: start a blog or some sort of publishing venture, read what other people are saying and comment on their blogs, join social networks and push your content through there, respond to everything people say to you and then repeat.
It’s a cycle. You work your way up from the D-List. It’s a big video game.
But recently I’ve been thinking about the 400 people or so (less I think) who follow me on Twitter. They rarely respond to anything I Tweet. It’s unclear what action they’ve ever been compelled to take because of something I’ve said.
I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why they would follow me if they didn’t want to interact with me.
I’m still not sure I understand, but having shut down for five days, I have some better sense. The archive of what I missed was there for the reading. I could easily log back in and catch up on the lives of the people I have come to know without missing a beat.
I still have a strange disconnected feeling since I wasn’t actively participating, but there is a still a sense that even though I wasn’t there, I was still there.
What does this all have to do with newspapers and media? Honestly, I don’t know if I’m able to parse through all of that right now. But there is a sense in my gut that it is related.
Our newspapers used to be the connectors of the community, but they aren’t anymore. The archives of my news, my contacts, my relationships and my information are all kept on my RSS reader, my Twitter archives, my blog comments and emails.
I can disconnect — and still be connected in a way different than my local news outlets because my news and social medium are more personal, more trustworthy and more relevant to me.
I wonder if that puts me in a small minority of people — the digerati — who will always find themselves more connected to people and the world through these emerging communication forms. Or are we moving towards a world where social media allows us to listen in our friends and our networks to get a sense of what is happening in our world?
