When linking was a way of writing

A El Roto cartoon from a few days ago perfectly explained one of the most annoying things and what worries me the most about the life we ​​live on the back of a postmodern society where the logic of social networks prevails for better and for worse: “Thanks to the new technologies I know the second and forget it instantly“. It accurately reflects what I observe in this kind of permanent reinvention of ideas and concepts that sound like they are supposedly new in the age of social networks. The lack of context and the lack of history in an internet that advances at the rate of clicks. Everything comes now, it is new and you can join that wave without stopping for a bit and analyze with some perspective if someone has already addressed this topic, if there are inevitable references when it comes to raising it or if this new concept is based on other ideas. more developed and deeper. Not only do I forget things instantly, but we are barely able to put the new in a certain previous context. It is, as always, another neura that, for those of you who are regulars, will start to sound repeated. Julen explained it perfectly:

In the corners of the Internet, we old men become carcas that do not know how to evolve. Unable to accept the change, we eat ourselves up prisoners of an itch that does not stop. We look at our posts and see in them an anachronism, a cult object that acquires museum status. We are beginning to be a kind of patrimony that should be protected due to being misplaced and out of place. The incontinent tide of social networks on the Internet is taking us ahead.

A stream of information instantly, of new trending topics that bury the previous one. We no longer read, we just click. We no longer write, we just click and retweet. We no longer link. Linking was the salvation because it allowed the construction of slightly more complex structures of related information, but it’s over. Linking was a way of discreetly saying “this is what I think, but these others have explained it much better“. To connect was to participate in a more or less organized conversation. Linking was exercising the ability to give context to things. Linking was a way to search for references before writing truisms. Linking was a way of giving history to a story. Linking was a way of saying “I remember what you wrote“. Linking was a form of memory. Less and less is linked because there is no longer time to stop to think and link to someone who has already written more interesting or useful things. Linking is from another era. There is no conversation, just a galloping timeline of fragmented information and coherent stories make no sense. And yet, millions of links travel the world in the form of likes and retweets or check-ins in I don’t know where Linking is a way of living, it is no longer a way of writing. For better and for worse.