I agree with almost everything the author of this article has to say. He is able to write those thoughts a lot more eloquently than I ever could.
The Viral Me: Devin Friedman Investigates the New World of Social Networking: Big Issues: GQ
Rahul isn't worried about people knowing who he is; he's worried about not enough people knowing who he is. I had this idea when I was in the midst of my ill-fated share-athon the previous month: Maybe the social layer could be a kind of mass experiment in the liberating nature of extreme truth. We'd all be exposed as needy, nostalgic, compassionate self-Googlers. But to people like Rahul, an open society isn't one where people have access to the real you. It is simply providing access to the identity you very carefully construct for human consumption."There is a section of the article that describes an experiment. "They gave people video cameras. Everyone over the age of 25 would turn it outward, and everyone under the age of 25 would turn it inward. " At 28 I am very close to that tipping point between the groups. This blog, and anything I do online, was meant to point outward. It was always meant to facilitate showing my view of the world, and not necessarily be about me. I've never been interested in sharing what I ate for lunch on Facebook... though I very well may have done that at some point.
I also really liked the part of the article that talks about all the garbage that gets posted online. Just read some of the trending topics on Twitter and be amazed at the stupidity that is displayed for all the world to see. How do we find the good stuff amongst all the crap? I hope my contributions go into the "good" bucket; though I am sure some people would consider it crap... and I am okay with that.
I have been shamelessly plugging instapaper for the last few weeks. I've used the free online link saving service for a while, but didn't find the real value of it until I got a Kindle. (Thanks Mom & Dad, I love it!) I likely would have never sat at my computer and read the entire GQ article. It is so much more enjoyable to read web content on the Kindle. You just save the links to Instapaper. When you have built up a few you just point your Kindle's browser to the instapaper site. You log in and click the button to download your articles in the Kindle-friendly format. Voila, you can read the full articles anytime you want without having to stare at your eye-straining lcd screen. They also have a nice recommendation page to enlighten you to interesting online content.
