Posts tagged social media

I love social. I love its honesty and humanity. Wrong social gets caught out very quickly.

Right social is effortless - trying too hard stands out like a sore thumb in what is, essentially, an extension of peoples’ lives.

Design. I keep coming back to it at the moment. A noble, professional craft, mindful of people and their lives.

Experience design, visual design, service design, information design, communication design and, now, social design.

No flim-flam. No smoke and mirrors. Just graft and empathy. A bit like being a vicar without the supernatural stuff.

Oscar Wilde would agree. In “De Profundis,” he wrote, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

In the practices of commonplacing and reblogging, this last phrase has literally become true: their passions a reblog.

While Nietzsche warned us about history’s capability to imprison us, Wilde would be more concerned that these technologies could efface our identities and, as a result, diminish our capacity for original thought.

On one’s Tumblr page, consciously or not, one forms one’s identity by appropriating other people’s words and images. And when using a commonplace book, as demonstrated by Justus Lipsius, one undergoes an exercise in recitation, not ratiocination.

Wilde is right — these collections, online or in print, induce a sort of intellectual passivity.

Social networks are subject to reverse gentrification. In traditional gentrification, the wealthy acquire property in low-income and working-class communities, changing the character of their surroundings, forcing up average rents and house prices in the process. The result is a move from a culturally heterogenous community to one that is more economically and socially homogenous.