Our Digital Crisis

Jonathan Harris has written a bunch of vignettes about the digital realm of our life, and how we should think about shaping it for the future:

Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

These experiences are sensitive neither to individual humans nor to the human collective, but only to page views and growth (in a corporate, not personal sense).

It is fitting that these companies call their customers “users”.

As we fill in the same boxes, answer the same questions, and express ourselves in the same generic ways, we might think this convergence of identity is a good thing, leading to some kind of global unity or mass empathy. But true empathy comes not from forcing people all to be the same, but from helping people to appreciate their differences.

Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

I'm posting this on Virb because it's one of the few, if not the only, social sites on the internet where I actually do feel as if each person's account is reflection on themselves. How many times have you read a review or a comment about Virb that says the website's user group is "cool" or "creative" people. I don't think there's necessarily anything special about Virb users, just that this website allows for the "cool" and "creative" side of people to be seen more clearly.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is a big thank you to Virb and it's developers for giving people an outlet such as this.

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