desktop metaphors
I’ve been thinking a lot about why we are all compelled to publish our thoughts on the internet. It’s like, when live journal got all “it has the word ‘journal’ in it so that means I’ll pretend no one can read it and be surprised when they do.” A lot of people are misusing this new ease with which one’s thoughts can be made public because there are no rules, there is no precedent.
When the desktop computer was invented, it too had no place in modern society. Lucky for us, Alan Kay at Xerox came up with this ingenious identifier, both for the virtual space a computer affords you and its purpose in your home–the desktop metaphor. So now with the internet, I’ve been trying to draw new parallels between items and places in physical space that serve the same function as those online. The desktop metaphor just keeps getting larger, encompassing more and more things, you know?
Live journal totally had the right idea, but people are retarded.
Blog pollution bums me out. Especially because it is TOTALLY controllable. See, it turns out that using live journal as your secret-locked-in-a-drawer-you-hope-is-stronger-than-the-flimsy-lock-on-the-front journal is not a bad idea at all, because you have the same amount of control over where it is and who sees it. You control your privacy settings to prevent the kids who stole your lunch money from entering the room where your journal is kept. You have settings that control which pages you show to your best friends and which become the essays that get you into college.
Some people balk at the idea of marking journal posts as “journal” or “just me” or whatever cute language your hosting site came up with; these people are all “why is it there if no one can see it?”
But you can see it.
And one day you’ll find it the way you found your high school journal in a box you forgot to unpack 5 years ago, only you’ll be looking through your email or your old bookmarks or your del.icio.us tags, and you’ll find your old angelfire account or your friendster.
I’ve decided that I advocate keeping a personal, private, no-one-can-see-it journal on that kind of blog site.
20 years ago we thought we’d be living in space by now. Instead we invented a different type of space.
Archiving your anything on the internet is better than an external hard drive because you don’t have to physically take care of it; there’s no dust, no silverfish, no delicate parts riding across the country in a U-Haul, just light and energy and storage you don’t have to worry about.
Did you feel safer keeping your journal under your bed or in your locker? I went to public school and shared a room so neither was a viable option….But the old notebooks I keep in the Manhattan Ministorage on second ave are chillin.
If you’re not still using the email account you created 10 years ago check it now, see if it’s still up. Check your friendster, your livejournal. Even if you deleted them, that stuff is out there…
you better watch out not to link your facebook account to your flick’r account and then forget that you did that and then decide to upload all your very personal photos to your flick’r on account of the fact that there is unlimited storage out there…
cause everyones gonna see it…