Part of shutting out the broadcast signal, or rather the cable blur, from my life was an attempt to push boundaries of experience and redefine media/information consumption. It's been over a year now and just a few months since I've started this blog. And I wanted to reflect a brief moment.
It wasn't until I truly started to dig into assets like Twitter and the Blogosphere that I realized the impact and possibility of what we are creating. We have condensed the world. It's cliche to say that the world is getting smaller, I know. But I don't mean "condensed" in the sense of homogeneity and singularity, but literally condensed. The web is a living journal, anthropology in motion. It is (and this has become one of my favorite phrases) "the great aggregator." It has brought all our interests into a central location, enabled communities to develop where there were none.
Another, disconnected point: is that very few of us use the web for purely web based things. We use it as a tool to share, to research, to learn, to connect, but most of the pay off happens in the corporeal world. I expect that to change in the future, we've already seen it start with ebooks and movies.
What I appreciate about the web is its depth. After skimming through the endless sheen of superficial information, users have access to the brightest, most innovative minds in their respected fields, or the best gossip, or most entertaining videos...it's endless. And with that comes connection. In addition to aggregation, the web has become an open forum that has redefined "popularity" and reconstructed "elite."
The bottom line is that this truly is anthropology in motion. And the web exists because of the connections we make through it. And without those connections there wouldn't be much of a web at all, just flailing sinews.
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