the counter trend to blogging will be...
(Pam) Meeting this weekend with some older relatives of mine, the conversation went to how technology has changed the way we interact with each other. There was criticism of the new ways of communicating - through email intead of letters, through text not voice, etc. One particular point was that people are able to publish their own, unedited thoughts and feelings on the internet via blogs - and that this felt more like a "brain vomit" of thoughts rather than a well thought through piece of literature or prose. I agree that what people choose to publish is often not high quality, whether it be on YouTube or an angsty teen poetry blog - but I don't think it's a bad thing - I'm sure something far better will come of it given time.
What do you think the counter trend of blogging will be? What's the next reaction that society will take, enabled by technology? Surely it will have something to do with finding your way through the miriad of people's thoughts and feelings and making sense of it all. Perhaps a way of randomly combining all the different thought pieces about a different topic, like a Google of prose (that searches on opinions or full topics rather than just key words?), or a technology based qualitative analysis tool that distills the essence of the topics and gives you the most agreed answer in the end...or is that already possible?
What do you think the counter trend of blogging will be? What's the next reaction that society will take, enabled by technology? Surely it will have something to do with finding your way through the miriad of people's thoughts and feelings and making sense of it all. Perhaps a way of randomly combining all the different thought pieces about a different topic, like a Google of prose (that searches on opinions or full topics rather than just key words?), or a technology based qualitative analysis tool that distills the essence of the topics and gives you the most agreed answer in the end...or is that already possible?
posted by ROInnovation at 12:50 PM
7 Comments:
I think that we are already seeing a move to a more filtered view of the web, these web 2.0 companies e.g. delicious (http://del.icio.us/) and (www.ziki.com) are moving towards a peer to peer recommendation/ what i like you will like approach. By creating a network of people who you trust you will trust their recommendations thereby ignoring angsty teen poetry unless that happens to be your thing....
Adam I knew you would know something that was already happening in this space! More examples of that trend from 2 years ago now, 'curated consumerism'. thanks for the examples....
There's an interesting article on del.icio.us here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1939056,00.html
As with many good ideas it started with an unmet need.... and resulted £30m (which doesn't happen quite so often).
This is really interesting stuff. It causes a couple of thoughts to pop to mind. Firstly, as Adam says, peoples' willingness to publish their ideas and opinions will lead to more social search (Google's "Ask a Question" service... where you pay a real person to provide an answer to your question, or Yahoo's new engine that returns answers to qualitative questions like, "What is the meaning of life?").
It also makes me think... via blogs and bulletin boards we're all writing our most closely held beliefs. If no one 'listens' to us via the web (because the sheer volume of content is so large we get lost in the muck), how will that make us feel? To pour your heart out to no audience? I'm imagining a need for online psychiatry... a professional I pay to read and analyze my blog and direct me down the path to 'enlightenment'. A virtual Buddha or Confucius.
Scott, do you think the internet can be a place of enlightenment or spirituality? sure it has lots of content and meaning and emotion, but it feels like it's submerged beneath pop-up ads and strange mis-spelled postings and wierdos....but I totally agree with you - if we live our lives more and more online and express ourselves through it we will need to get help to find the soul in it, to keep the soul in what we do. hmmmmmmmmmm that is really interesting...if we were Google what products would that become? prayer clips....mantra media..........yourSaint search engine.......randomly generated GOD?
On the most basic level, the web can be a source of spirituality... I ran a search for "church webcast" and received tens of thousands of results. However, that is different from enlightenment (at least, to me it is). How do we achieve the latter? I'm not sure. Where does enlightenment even come from? I suppose if I had to define it I'd try something like, "when one gains deep insight into their own life and sense of purpose." It's interesting to think about in the context of the web.
The other idea that just came to mind was virtual missionaries. There could be Jehovah's Witness avatars in Second Life that try and get you to convert to their religion... would be sort of an interesting experiment.
Perhaps another way of looking at this is that not everyone is putting up material in a drive to make money/ be recognised. I liken this to writing where people should first of all write for themselves, for the enjoyment and to learn the craft. If as a result of this they become succesful then that's great. For example there are plenty of forums which use peer to peer reviewing whether it be for poetry/ film making etc. If people want feedback then they can join and start to contribute, then they can get feedback on their own work.
It all comes down to what your motivations are.
In terms of spirituality, not really a strong point of mine. But I would say there is no real difference in going to church and watching a webcast, in terms of the sermon etc. And the web offers the opportunity to discover more viewpoints and not be restricted to the stuffy old pastor in your local church.
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