I was zipping around Facebook today and I saw an ad for the KIN, which is a cute little phone based around the social aspects of phones. I think their website is perfect at exposing what phones are doing and what people want them to do. We’re not just free agents anymore. We’re all a part of the collective unconscious of the web. A lot of people don’t like this concept, and that’s fine. Just don’t have sign up for facebook and twitter, and x y z.
The thing is that a lot of people “Get this” in that you want to be able to instantly communicate with your social circle at any moment on any level. There’s big social circles “Everyone I have friended on facebook/twitter”, and smaller circles “subcategories/groups of people on facebook/twitter”.
People want to be constantly scrap booking and archiving their life, while not having to ACTUALLY SCRAPBOOK. I’m sure as our data becomes amassed enough, there will be lot’s of great ways to present this in a digestible way. The web is organizing much faster than any other social structure has. And those people who called themselves “technological marxists” and I laughed at back at the day, thinking that technology would bring about the revolution, could be PARTIALLY right… Technology doesn’t make social change, people do. But the web in all of it’s layers provides the communication capabilities to speed it up.
Your kids, and grandkids, and their grandkids are going to be able to get to know you, almost instantly. If Abe Lincoln had a twitter, i’m sure bits and pieces of it would be in text books (not that they’d we’d have textbooks, probably something like an ipad (but not shitty)).
Right now I’m using a Motorola Cliq, which I love. It combines all of your twitter/facebook/google/last.fm/Picasa contacts into singular entitities in your phone book. Which is great, because I can choose HOW I converse with each person, easily and without opening more apps than i need to. Also, it takes everyone’s streams (status updates) and places it into one mega-stream, which is convenient, but I’ll never have time to read them all. My only gripes with the phone is it’s still running Android 1.5 (it updates to 2.1 in June) and that there isn’t a flash.
In the future, whether you like it or not, everyone is going to have little computers on them with web capabilities to access any piece of information they need, and to document anything they see fit. It’s just how it’s going to be in the Western World. 99% of the information recorded is going to be trivial, but that’s about how much information at the library is trivial to any single person. There’s more books then you could ever read and information than you could ever comprehend. The secret is working within and getting the most out of it.
I think twitter was a fluke. People want to constantly communicate whether or not people are listening. BLOGS are too big, and bulky, and demanding. Look at how many times I’ve updated this wordpress as compared to my facebook. Most people aren’t English professors and they don’t want to write out comprehensive essays about topics. They just want to say “The new Nightmare on Elmstreet was meh”.
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