Social networking considered harmful.
I used to create content. Now I am just a filter.
Creating content used to be the thing to do on the Internet. Write a blog. Write a nice little how-to. Curate a wiki. Those activities are still possible today, of course, but social networking has created an immense gravitational field, drawing in would-be content creators. The default activity on the Internet today has become consuming and filtering content. Likes, tweets, pluses, reshares, and reblogs. Hash-tagged sentence fragments bolstering an already-trending topic. Filtering people into circles. Commenting for the sake of karma.
Don’t get me wrong; there is great value in social networking data. Sites like Reddit are brilliant, and they rely on harvesting signals from the masses. I like knowing a phone app is useful because several friends have +1’d it. I like local restaurant recommendations, pointers to cool articles, and political pieces of interest that friends clue me into. Yet, I find myself waiting for this enormous social networking wave to break, so we can all move on and just consider it a part of using the Internet, not the overriding purpose of using the Internet.
I’m certainly not the first curmudgeon to be critical of social networking. I feel compelled to write about this, if nothing else, for selfish reasons. Writing these words is an act of creation; a break from serving as a content filter in the social networking machine. The simple process of sitting here and analyzing how I feel about a topic forces me to structure my thinking in a more tangible way, suitable for communication.
I’m not planning to stop spamming my friends with re-shares of things that made me laugh (sorry to disappoint, everyone) but I do plan to make a concerted effort each day toward creating something, even if it’s not necessarily interesting or unique. I feel fulfilled when I create content just for the sake of it.
I suppose this half-rant is really an appeal to social networkers everywhere. Dedicate some time each day to creation. Write—beyond 140 characters—about topics that interest you. Write code and put it on Github. Upload a YouTube video. Make art. Create a new web site that does something neat. Whatever it is, it does not have to be groundbreaking. It just has to be yours.
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