Twitter: Lifelogging Platform or Self Promotional Tool?
Why DO individuals seek to announce to the world their “states and life histories” in excruciatingly, self-absorbed detail?
Jamais Cascio presents to the Singularity Summitt and fittingly posts his remarks to the open Web.
The thought provoking treatise on “metaverse singularity” addresses “lifelogging.”
“What are you doing”? is the user-facing, philosophical underpinnings of the Twitter technology.
Cascio on the implications of systems that “record and report the states and life histories of objects and users” which he indicates as “enhancing observation, recall, and communication”:
The observation tools of an Augmented Reality world get turned inward, serving as an adjunct memory. Lifelogging systems are less apt to be attuned to the digital comments left at a bar than to the spoken words of the person at the table next to you. These tools would be used to capture both the practical and the ephemeral, like where you left your car in the lot and what it was that made your spouse laugh so much….significant personal implications: what does the world look like when we know that everything we say or do is likely to be recorded?
Moreover, what does personal, direct experience become when observation and archiving of experience is the ultimate end game, rather than the activity itself? In other words, whatever happened to the joy of serendipitously living in the moment?
I enjoyed the once in a lifetime experience of ringing in a new millenium at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City: New Year’s Eve 2000. I partied like it was (no longer) 1999 with my husband with the standard, old school, party accessories–noisemakers and champagne. Our unforgettable new millenium experience, however, was not encumbered by the new standard digital party accessories–cameras, still and video.
I was on the dance floor with my husband for intimate, one-on-one mutual celebration; We were surrounded, however, by couples that were actually threesomes: man, woman and video camera!
The party scene was abstractly surreal, couples were not in reality dancing with each other, they were purposefully moving on the dance floor, literally in their own individual worlds, for the sole purpose of recording supposed spontaneous enjoyment for their future lifelong reviewing pleasure.
Lifelogging extracts a heavy price: While people perceive they are enhancing their experiences by capturing ephemeral moments for a lifetime, they are actually depriving themselves of fully living each important moment.
Twitter? Not a real “stream of consciousness” either.
The Twitter team says it is fueling a “global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: “what are you doing?’ The answers though are self-selected, self-turned, self-edited public sign posts for self-motivated reasons, not actual unfiltered, disinterested snapshots of “what you are doing” in a precise moment of time.
What are celebrity Twitterers Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Michael Arrington “doing”? Often promoing their latest blog posts.
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