RSSFriday B.S.: It’s a Web-wide World
Apr 23
Life in Digital Comments Off
As time goes on, I’m becoming less a fan of social media in all its myriad forms. Facebook went from being a virtual high school reunion to being a focus group for marketers. Twitter is the 21st century version of morse code except that it has effectively given the entire earth’s population PLI (pragmatic language impairment or the inability to differentiate the meaning between words and symbols). And there are others, many others, discussion groups, theme-driven communities, dating sites, and support forums, all built around the idea of uniting people with common interests.
Discussion forums were one of the original constructs of the internet. You posted a discussion thread and people replied to you personally, each new exchange adding to the conversation. Almost every social media platform still has some form of discussion forum, even though it is a decidedly old school way to communicate. But the platforms themselves have become complicated, bloated systems as they attract more users. The worst offenders, facebook and twitter, have stopped being about community and become something else entirely. A virtual mall, if you will, replacing the physical shopping mall for the place to hang out.
It was nice to make contact with long-lost friends. And for every three or four random people I encounter in my social media travels, one of them is someone worth having met. But no amount of effective networking disguises the fact that the environment itself is toxic. You can no longer have simple ambitions when it comes to being a member of an online community. You’re not allowed to. You implicitly agree to subject yourself to targeted advertising, habit aggregation, and whatever iteration the utility comes up with next. Ironically, I used to say that facebook et al had a right to find ways to make money from their product. I still think so, I just don’t want any part of it.
Distancing yourself from social media, and more generally an online presence, is virtually impossible in 2010. Once any aspect of your personal life ends up on the web, there is no way to erase it. Anonymity is a myth. At best you pray for confidentiality of your personal information. Everything is backed up. Any sort of online presence requires you to have a website, an e-mail address, a twitter account, a page on facebook, blogs, page counters, traffic analytics, feeds, page rank, photo albums, podcasts, mp3s…the list of extensions with personally identifiable information is endless. And here’s the real catch: you have access to all those extensions whether you want to or not, whether you intend to use them or not. Join a forum, create an e-mail account, click on an ad, just one simple action jettisons you into the web firmament for the rest of time. Even if you opt out, close your account, or never use it to begin with, it’s already too late, somewhere, someone is tracking you, ranking you, aggregating information about you and broadcasting it to anyone else who wants to know.
I thought a lot lately about wiping clean my facebook account, shutting down my twitter feed and systematically removing myself from the internet. It has a strange appeal, however impractical that might be. But it doesn’t stop there. I need to stop shopping online. I need to stop using google maps for directions from my phone when I get lost. I need to shut down my two blogs, stop creating goofy videos, delete my e-mail accounts, let my domains expire, and give up instant messenger. And I probably need to stop selling books because I will need to remove my book listings from amazon and other online stores. Impractical begins to seem like an understatement.
The other end of the spectrum is total control over your image, likeness, information by creating accounts for everything and monitoring them continuously. It’s not that farfetched a notion. What do you do right now for your financial accounts -- credit cards, checking accounts, investment accounts? Whatever level of monitoring you do for them, you now need to do for all your myriad social networks. You no longer have the option of taking a passive role in your web presence. It was taken away from you the minute you went online.
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Andrew Marx is a long time writer on SmartReMarxcom and recently finished a new work of fiction titled Whisper in the Walls, available as a free digital download in May. He hasn’t given up on twitter yet. Please leave a comment below.
