I am doomed to write on the blog. It is, by far, the most practical thing I have found to organize my ideas, readings and proto-thoughts. So, even if they are killed, finished off and sentenced, this is where it will always be easier to find me and where the most obvious traces of where I am. Fighting a little against the transience of everything, with the increasingly horrible social web that wants us to click instead of writing, reading and thinking.
Then came Twitter and, although I think it’s waning ( that is to say, “lifelong” users and those who spend more time there are establishing uses that make new users leave in fright, the big stars and also anonymous people who come close to Twitter who are always on the cover of El País). Damn the press, by the way, with so much ridicule about the latest bullshit on Twitter. what i was going to That I have found Twitter very useful and it is a good way to keep track of what I am reading at all times, of what interests me even if I do not agree, and to have an access environment for people who are out there entangled . And always taking care that the timeline is not filled with eventism, self-help para-psychology, sentimental or pseudo-committed spasms in the form of trending topics and so on. Outside of that, it’s one of the best ways to share things I find and broaden the radar of people who are everywhere involved in things that interest me.
Then came Tumblr and for a while it didn’t feel like a tool useful. Always the utility ahead, that for hobbies there are already other things. It is just a record of fugacity in the form of photos, links or videos. That is why it is not a blog nor will it ever be content generation. But it is the sign of the times and today it is no longer customary to dedicate three paragraphs to something you have read. Better to post it and leave it there in the immensity of nothing. But at least I’ve discovered that it’s useful for further cataloging my stuff – only when I discovered the option to view the archive and seeing from tagsthe contents I understood that it could be of some use- and even be a graphical repository of books that I will one day read or photos to use ever. It doesn’t add much more but, for now, it doesn’t get in the way.
In fragmentary drift I now use Scoop.it until I get tired of reviewing it from time to time, because I just don’t see the use of it. For now, it’s just an exercise in content curation about technologies and their relationship with urban life, as a specialized thematic complement now that I’m more involved in these topics. It won’t get very far, but there it is for now.
But without a doubt, I shouldn’t miss Delicious. It’s all there, organized by human minds and not by cold algorithms or hierarchies of information based on how many “likes” you have. An environment without competition -more followers, more votes, more clicks-, anonymous enough so that only what you share matters and not who you are and where you do with the information what you want to organize it as you want.
These are the traces, more and more fragmentary, in times of transience, of thought of 140 characters of weight, of uncritical adherence, of relativism. In the meantime, I will continue working on “at least three paragraphs” if something interests me. And that you can read it.
Image< /a> Taken from zumito on Flickr under license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0