Comments on: Disposable Social Media Tools

By: M.Lawrenson

M.Lawrenson — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:16:34 +0000

I get the feeling about all these Flickr/Tumblr/Twitter/Whatevr type efforts are nothing more than the web’s triumph of style gimmicks over content. So little to say and so many places to say it. There’s few demands for considered thought online – get it out, blogged, find a pic from Google or vid from YouTube. I guess most people are happy with the present 2Mbps twinkling vacuum. But if this is the result of democratising opinion and the dissemination thereof, then it sucks. It sucks like a black hole full of Murray Mints.

And I am thankful I have no ‘personal social network’ that needs taking care of online.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:43:03 +0000

There’s a fine point here somewhere Pete – while the trend seems to be pulling everything together with lifestreaming, the understanding is helped by the divisions allowing each to draw their own lines (or not) between the data and sources.

There’s a hug hole for a service that collates, lifts and separates according to our attention. It’s a while away yet, I guess, until that time I’m off the opinion that we should throw everything up in the metaphorical air and let people chose what to catch as it comes down.

“lifeclouding”?

@Toby Bill Drummond is one of the few geniuses left imho. Can’t wait to get hold of his new book. If only the man could be persuaded to lifestream, him I could read everything about.

By: Toby

Toby — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 09:15:56 +0000

This is also true of all forms of media right now – Music (for example) anyone can pick up garage band and make an awful mashup of a Girls Aloud Accapella and a Hard Fi instrumental (all available “free” with one click) and voila mash up heaven.
Or pick up a guitar and be James Blunt via Myspace.
Or a mic, camera and mime – voila back to girls aloud.
But once it is up it’s gone. on to new “project”
Then you find an unbelievable 12 minute piece from a Belgrade Jazz band that blows your mind, and your heart is right back in the ‘hunt’
Or photos.
How many great photos can you find on flickr with 4 views, this aren’t “interesting” apparently.
But there will be photos with 1,000 views that are ‘OK’. BUT they are beautifully tagged, pooled, grouped and basically promoted.

But, i think we are talking about promotion of promoted content vs scribbles, humming, snaps, and life.
God it is the blur again.
Media is clay.
We are Media.
There is no Mass Media.

sorry stream of consciousness.

but I think the answer lies somewhere with Bill Drummond who is currently producing symphonies using everyday people signing one note at a time, performing live.
and deleting it.
It is the performance that counts not the record of it.
It is your’s girls smile, not the photo.
It’s the life not the record.

By: Stef

Stef — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 07:42:17 +0000

I’ve been having trouble explaining this one too. Looking back at that overview I did for IdeasForLife I just wasn’t making any sense. Have you found any way to explain this in a sentence yet?

By: Shona

Shona — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:23:36 +0000

“It’s not blogs so much as a mesh of online tools that collectively represent me ……..

……the Internet was designed to survive outage at any point”

I’m not really talking about the social media thing here, but these snippets struck a chord with me.

When my last computer died on me, or more to the point, I killed it by hitting ‘enter’ after a grand series of internal hardware failures one evening last year, I’d had the sense to save the majority of key files on an external hard drive. But, I lost alot. The online resources I’d stored work in largely recovered the bits I lost. Whilst I lost much of the groundwork behind the work, I had enough to resurrect them, even if it meant reproductions from scratch.

WordPress and Flickr saved face for me following the event; you don’t have to make your entire world public, you just need to know where you can use the tools as a canny store, sometimes. Simple web-based tools fulfilled my basic data needs.

Media on the web can be disposable, depending how you view its use. But use it to your advantage if you want an additional means of storage.

Some sources, if you choose carefully, can be used to keep your work within its case to preserve your input and dig you out of a hole when your local machine goes loco.