Saturday, August 22, 2015

You get what you pay for

For a long time I've been aware of the decreasing quality of my interactions with the internet. I'm far more of a consumer now that I was in the beginning. I've let the notion that I'm powerless to change things infect my thinking, and it has eased me in a daily routine which results in lots of "likes", shares, and a few attempts at humor our sarcasm.

It doesn't have to be this way, and I don't have to let it continue. The web isn't dead. Blogging isn't dead.. this entry is an existence proof of that. The tools still work, and are still valuable. RSS still works, and RSS readers are still around to support it. I, and many of my peers (like Scoble, for example) have decided to let them go fallow. It's time to take back our time and attention and pull together a future which combines the best of the past, and the best of the new tools.

I agree with Dave's criticism of Facebook, in the middle of a post about libraries, and that prompted this post. As I told Doc Searls a very long time ago, you get what you tune your own feedback loops to optimize on.  I'm going to tweak my own settings a bit. 8)

If you consume media all day, and only offer up a like, or a sharing of something interesting... you have to be VERY selective if you are actually helping increase the quality of discourse. I've not been selective, and for that I am sorry.

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