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There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning
by ecdavis 11y ago
There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use.
My grandparents have a large collection of photos, each captioned with the year, location, and the reason the photo was taken. Looking through these photos is a great experience because it's a curated history of their lives. For better or worse, the practice maintaining photo collections in that manner has been made obsolete by technology. The equivalent now is to upload everything and have technology curate it for you, filtering out the mundane and saving the important or otherwise memorable content. That's what the Facebook timeline attempts to do, and it's a feature missing from the other social applications you identified.
I don't think it's a failure of Twitter or Snapchat that they lack curated timelines, though. That's not their purpose. They are aimed squarely at communicating at and about the present. If they do take over in-the-present communication from Facebook, though, then Facebook will have a hard time constructed the curated timeline.
All that being said, I don't use any of them.
- benten10 11y ago>There's a pretty big difference between communicating in and about the present vs. communicating about the past. I think what you've identified is the beginning of a distinction between those two activities in the technologies we use. That's a great observation. I had not explored that line of reasoning. That gives me something to chew on. Right off though, I'd say that... I suspect we used to value communicating about the past more because it was so difficult to do so, but as facebook makes it easier, the value has gone down. How's this sound: before long epics were written down, the oral tradition of reciting them kept them alive, and thus the entire process was valued. Once they were written, it got easier to 'remember' the epics. S, writing was not as valuable as orally remembering/reciting because it was easier/more common/not as important? This is not the best comparison, but sounds right to me at the moment.
- jamiek88 11y agoWell,famously the Greek elders complained about the laziness of the modern technology of writing the philosophy down rather than rote learning!
- ecdavis 11y agoI think you're partly right, but I think another aspect of it is how new all this technology is. We completely dropped the "old" way of doing things (carefully take photo, get it developed, store it in an album) and replaced it with the current way (take lots of photos, upload them all to some service, share with friends) in a decade or less. Most people simply haven't accumulated all that much history on these services yet. It'll be interesting to see what our personal histories look like once this technology has been around for a few more decades. Things like the Facebook timeline may become increasingly important, or we may all abandon curated histories because (as you say) information is so easily retrieved now.