The Shambling March of Modern Communications Technology

Well that went quickly.  I've been distracted by robotics and such but a couple of weeks back marked eight years since the first tentative post of Detritus of Empire went up.  A lot has happened since then.

2011 was the tail end, or perhaps just past it, of The Golden Age of Blogging. At one point in time everyone with a computer and something to say had a chance to speak to the entire world.  After a few months most of them ran out of anything the world was interested in hearing.

Soon after came the rise of other ways to express, well, something or other.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.  These were all easier than blogging.  But in my opinion not better.  

The new types of "social media" encouraged short, spontaneous, picture based communication.  In other words, superficiality.  As wifi signals dissipate far out into space I wonder what sophisticated alien surveillance networks make of all this.  Pictures of plates of food.  Hostile rants composed largely of abbreviations and devoid of capitalization and punctuation.  They'd be forgiven for thinking we had suffered a technology collapse and had been reduced to the status of angry, hungry savages.

And maybe this is not so far off the mark.  Well, not the hungry part, at least here in North America and Europe we remain very well fed thanks.  But in the sense of less information being conveyed I think we have had a technology collapse.

I see this all too often working with the current generation.  They toss together an email with sketchy punctuation and flow, hit send and walk away.  They assume communication is instantaneous and infallible.  Of course roughly 50% of the time something gets screwed up.  Spam filters block them.  Files are sent in unsupported formats.  People just ignore them.

And as to the titans of the social media age, well it is starting to look as if even some of them have peaked and are slipping into decline.  Facebook has been rocked by brand damaging scandals regards their acquisition of user data.  Twitter is becoming synonymous with mindless trollery.

In communications as in all things there is an evolution, a somewhat orderly changing over time.  It took millenia for cave painting to become pottery decoration.  With the invention of alphabets clay tablets could preserve specific information rather than imagery.  Papyrus had a good long run, many centuries before morphing into alternatives you could acquire in other climates.  

The printing press revolutionized communication and led to books, newspapers, the little messages in fortune cookies.  Radio complemented print, then images were added and television started the slow decline of printed media.

The internet has been compared to drinking out of a fire hose.  With amounts of information you can customize and consume around the clock while - in theory - never changing out of your pajamas.  

Blogging was "important" for such a tiny sliver of time.  Really just that moment between wide spread access to inexpensive computers and internet and the point at which the big players managed to channel the flow of information by search parameters and so forth so that as much of it as possible comes from sources they hope to monetize.

If you exclude what I assume to be automated 'bots, my traffic runs to dozens or at best hundreds of views per post.  Cat videos, Kardashian doings on Twitter, whatever actually happens on Instagram, these are gigantic click farms.  Or to see it another way, turnstiles that tick as you go through, tagging you electronically to receive targeted ads.

I figure to soldier on a while.  I think of it as being like a stubborn audiophile who insists on that retro technology called vinyl.  It's more work for only debatable improvement in final product, but actually the process is the enjoyable part.  I like writing. Doing it regularly keeps me in practice.  When I see people struggle to put coherent thoughts together into short missives I marvel at the ease with which my fingers more or less know what to do while my brain dashes ahead.

Dashing ahead into year nine.