Seven years ago, I adventured to Japan with a friend – it was the summer after high school. We spent a month there, backpacking, hosteling, and gawking. I recently came across what my 18-year-old self wrote about the journey. I only started keeping journal entries near the end of the trip (we left at the beginning of July… seven years ago tomorrow, in fact). Yes, I was a typical dumbass teenage J.D. Salinger fan at the time, but there were other influences, too. This is moderately embarrassing, but here it is, as I wrote it then:
“People, not machines, made the Renaissance.” – Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Web content is increasingly being designed to appeal to machines. The more machine-oriented content becomes, the less human-oriented it becomes; the focuses are inversely related. This progression is not sustainable indefinitely – it must slow. If it doesn’t, search engines and aggregators will become meaningless, because the human-oriented content they were meant to collect will be overwhelmed by machine-optimized slop.
SEO specialists are busy ensuring that text is easily readable by Google, not by humans. SEM specialists are ensuring that content is chunked into small pieces which are easily categorized and quickly consumed. This increases their appeal to crowd-sourced aggregators (Digg, Reddit) and aids their viral progression through sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
A new brand of content-providing website is being built specifically to capitalize on aggregation hiveminds. These sites host primarily non-original images and videos, short, superficial blurbs of text, lists, and other easy-to-describe chunks of content. Sites which still produce new content are adjusting their strategies to appeal to these aggregation and search machines as well, and their original content is becoming indistinguishable from amateur content, recycled content, and iterative “memes.”
Advertisers (with Google and Facebook’s help) are increasingly using this hive as data for algorithms which better target advertising. For content-producing websites, readers become data which is used to optimize content to increase net page views and sell ads. But humans are not data, and treating them as data will cause them to resent you.
The following is a preliminary, only-just-formed (though wordy!) segment of my thoughts about where the internet will head in the next five years, give or take. It is heavily, but not entirely, extrapolated from ideas Jaron Lanier has expressed, especially in his recent manifesto, which I’ve quoted.
Note: I’ll add here that I’m very conscious of the fact that early ideas and speculation are often missing vital pieces – I don’t claim to be a soothsayer, and I don’t mean to imply that I hate the internet. I don’t criticize out of spite.
Above: My windshield wiper broke while I was driving, so I decided to just let the rain wash itself away.
Legislation in Washington DC has allowed same-sex couples to apply for marriage licenses. In related news, Republican congressmen are now sighing slightly more audibly when looking at their wives.
Apparently an Atheist group at a Texas university is giving away free porn in exchange for bibles, to illustrate that the bible contains objectionable material. A Christian group at the school is unphased, stating, “We’ve given away more free bibles in the last few days than ever before!”
I met a guy who said he wanted to be both President and Chief Justice of the United States. I said, “What are you, Taft?”
That joke was historical.
At a job interview I was asked if I was a strong negotiator. I told them I had no experience or other qualifications, so if they hired me I must be an effing expert.
Women are always complaining when I walk up behind them and massage their shoulders. I guess I’m a massagynist.
I once dated a woman who still subscribed to “Seventeen.” She had too many issues for me.
Think playing string instruments is hard? Try string theory instruments. Ever play a C sharp in the 10th dimension?
Facebooking, tweeting, youtubing, strategizing, editorializing, illustrating, administrating, redditing, contacting support, offering support, sending prizes, making Facebook mad at me, making spreadsheets, writing announcements, SEOing, SEMing, SMMing, direct marketing, viral marketing, brand identifying, pinging simplex synergizers and finding grassroots gardeners with suitable semantic web advertude and blogospheric influence. I need a beer.
OK, it was only trending in San Francisco. For a while. But, but, still. #LoseFollowersTuesday is a phenomenon, and it doesn’t even roll off the tongue. Here are just a few of the highlights:
I was having some boozi with a friend a few weeks ago, and we were both itching for a smoke, but we had to go one at a time so we wouldn’t lose our prime bar seating. And he said…
“Do you mind if I just…go first?”
TITS! He put me in a verbal headlock with the most powerful question in the English language: “Do you mind?” This lead to a Seinfeldian discussion about the phrase, like we do, and this is what I’ve now determined:
If you deny the request which follows a “do you mind,” you’re implying that the asker is being unreasonable. Thus the askee is forced to decide if the interaction will be pleasant or confrontational, and this dilemma can crush the strongest wills. There is a counter, if you have the balls, and that is another “do you mind.” You can prefix it with an “actually” for added impact.
“Actually, do you mind if I go first?”
It didn’t work.
Anyway, I do have a point, and that is that signage could benefit from this observation. Instead of our office’s flaccid “Please! Keep the kitchen clean,” which basically says, “Whatever, fuck this shit up,” the sign should read, “Do you mind keeping the kitchen clean? Thanks champ.” That’s a compelling sign. That sign says, “Damn straight you’re keeping this kitchen clean, you filthy bastard.”
By the way, do you mind leaving a comment on this post? Thanks pal.
My dad was a blacksmith. We would have gotten along better, but he always had an axe to grind.
I care about the environment, but tree sitters are really going out on a limb.
If my options were hell or high water, I’d take the problem solved by floating on something.
I thought I smelled something fishy, but it turned out to be a red herring.
I feel like a million dollars: dirty, wrinkled, and covered with cocaine.
Nobody likes being wrong. The problem with politicians is that they can do something about it.
I know hardship, I once had to eat nothing but food for three weeks.
I was once so broke that I only had three dollars in my checking account. I found two more dollars in my pocket, deposited them, and wrote a check for a pack of cigarettes. It’s that kind of thinking that got me a pack of cigarettes.
I used to know a guy who had synesthesia, but he said he couldn’t talk with me anymore because my voice tasted too purple.
One of my friends told me he’s a compulsive liar, but I don’t believe him.
My name is Tyler Wilde. I'm a social media expert. HAHAHA, just kidding. I make internets for GamesRadar, paint pictures, and play the
harmonica poorly. If you'd like to let me know that I've won the lottery, you
can contact me at tjwilde [at] gmail [dot] com. And follow me on twitter, if you're into that sort of thing.
