Web2.0 and Me: It’s Over
January 7th, 2009 by Chantelle Oliver | 3 Comments »
Yes. That’s right. I’m saying it’s over. My love affair with the socialnets might have finally ended.
As CNN and phishing scams have piled on, the gloss has come off Twitter for me. Cloud computing is just another boring concentration of power. And the (white, male, monied) tech news ratface race is blisteringly tedious. It’s not that I am going to be quitting Twitter or the cloud: I’m writing this post in the cloud on Google Docs. But it’s all completely integrated into my life now. Like breathing. Tools that are available just aren’t really that sexy anymore.
But maybe nothing’s changed except me. I’ve started doing mindfulness training so I can be a balanced healthy person. That’s meditation without god and cultural appropriation, I guess. In order to succeed at mindfulness the ego and the body have to be overcome. All thoughts of past and future need to be quelled with a focus on the present moment.
Web2.0 is anti-mindful. It is entirely about ego, a.k.a. analytics. What’s more, despite early subrosa cyberfeminist utopianism the socialnets are also about the body. Maybe before bandwith supported .jpegs and video it made a little sense. But now with each icon you choose and video you post, you are offerring yourself up to seduce your desired audience. And each present moment of socialnetworking is a product of the war between maintaing past and nurturing future “friend” levels.
Twitter user Mindful is experimenting with of-the-moment tweets. Unfortunately it makes me want to stop trying mindfulness because the tweets are so dull. Illustrating my greatest fear and resentment about meditation: that it is a choice between becoming an annoying boring person full of peace or a mentally ill bonanza of eccentric dress and ideas.
All the rest of this week I am going to experiment with my own mindful tweets. What I’m going to call mindfulsickness. If they are dull I’ll quit trying to be sane. But if instead I get thousands of new followers, I can once again get excited about the socialnets and be sane too and it will be a great big win for us all!
On the money about web 2.0 fading in its new prettiness. It just makes me realize how in my virtual life I am no different than in my real life, as in I am not a social butterfly. The same people that make millions of friends in real life succeed in web 2.0, but those such as myself will always wander, mostly alone.
Great post..but surely this is just the fall off the hype cloud – socialwebness becoming a part of what we do and who we are rather than the over-excitable, over-funded, over-egoed mass that it is now? This is the “invisible technology” that Tom Standage writes about, right?
It took me a little while to absorb this, then it hit me while I was pondering my twitter statistics. It’s interesting to think about who these networks benefit more – people who genuinely use it as a tool to stay in touch with friends and colleagues, or those of us who know a little more, and using the system automatically becomes gaming it.
I’m with you on #mindfulsickness.