Digitally Disillusioned

While meditating on the catastrophe that is the current state of Twitter, I am faced with the realization that online communities are for the most part terrible.

First and foremost is the horrific siloing of personal content - instead of thoughts, ideas, images, and memes percolating across the internet in some liberated existential sense you end up crafter of a proprietary repository of content surrounding a central topic. If you waltz over to Penny Arcade you find a fine example of this, where each subforum is topical and even within this microcosm members don’t talk to each other. It’s like the worlds worst bar, where people try to one-up each other instead of creating a digital community.

(But don’t misunderstand me, I still love it)

On a blog (or myspace or facebook) like this one the problem is still the same, the topic is just self aggrandizement instead of something arbitrary. And unless the author proves exceptionally clever, this creates a weird one way relationship that is only sustainable if you travel in social circles filled with closet voyeurs.

And since almost all of us border on being entirely unclever, a solution is critical unless we want the notion of online communities to really be about celebrity and ego instead of togetherness and sharing. OpenID seems to be in the right direction. But is something like SIOC?

So, in summary, tl;dr; and all that, we need to fix the internet with a subtext suggesting that I’m apparently a digital social communist.

(also, OpenID will soon be enabled on this blog. We can at least try this things that seem to move towards nirvana)