Big Gaping Logic Flaws
Posted by Star on 07 Dec 2009 at 03:00 pm | Tagged as: News, Outgoing Links, Technology
This is actually an article from November that I put off blogging about because… well, you know. It’s probably a little scattered for that reason; I beg your indulgence.
Do digital diaries mess up your brain?
If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information — creating digital diaries, or “lifestreaming” — what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we’re headed.
The thing that strikes me about this article is that it seems to assume that the technology it’s talking about is being used in a particular way. It’s looking at blogs, for example, as simply a high-tech version of the old diary in which we (well, some of us) used to record important events and our innermost thoughts and feelings for easy retrieval later. It sees Twitter as a log of one’s daily activities. And yes, some people do use them that way, but I think that to take that as the norm is probably misunderstanding how this technology is being used on the whole.
To me, the whole point of the Internet is communication. I document events in my life here, yes, but not because I want to save the information for later. That’s a secondary function, and one that I very seldom use. My point in blogging things like Natalie’s birth or our move to a new house is not to make sure I remember it later, but to share it with my friends and family and whoever else might care. When I tweet or update my status on Facebook, actually quite often it has nothing to do with the big events of my life; it’s just as often a random thought I wanted to share, a little complaint about something that happened, or a quote or link I thought my friends and family would find interesting.
It’s not about recording my life. It’s about communicating it, sharing it. I write as though I may be writing to myself, because I don’t know how many people are actually reading. I don’t keep stats on this blog; I can see how many people are following me on Twitter or Facebook or Google Reader or Goodreads or wherever, but have no way of knowing how many are actually listening to what I say or whether they are passing on my words to anyone else. When you get right down to it, though, what I’m trying to do is to share my life with others, to say something that someone finds helpful or worthwhile in some way. I’m not doing this to store information for myself; I’m doing it to spread information.
