Hey guys,
Sorry I haven't been posting much on this blog!! Sadly I admit facebook has consumed much of my online interactive time. I have sacrificed quality content for random musings, kooky youtubes and amusing short grabs. It was fun for a while but now I've reached saturation point and my mind is craving depth and text... yes text!!! I miss text. I miss using that part of my brain that has to think, imagine and ponder over a longer period of time. I like the anonymity and simplicity of text and I worry about its future? Will everything become a moving image? Will all telephone calls become video calls? Will all email be replaced by facemail? Will text become almost irrelevant in 10 years time? I'm not anti video or anti facebook it's just that the pace of change is frightening and I'm concerned that it's stressing people out, that it's creating a kind of scrambled brain syndrome as people in all walks of life feel increasingly chained to their computers. Is it time to go backwards?
When facebook first came out I resisted it for about a year. Happy with my blogs and my_myspace and other online tools like my folk ally open mic page, I felt I had more than enough mediums to communicate and interact online. Increasingly I felt the pressure to join facebook as many other fellow musicians had fan pages and event spaces that were helping them to network and attract fans. With everyone else on there I worried that I could miss out on opportunities if I denied the technology any further and so I decided if I can't fight it I'll join it and make it work for me... and it did. It has been a great way to manage my gigs and let people know what's coming up. It's also been a handy way for me to find out about other people's events and gigs.
It's handy for now, but soon everything is about to change and I could potentially be starting all over again in terms of social networking. There's a new cat on the scene called Diaspora, which is currently being developed and threatens facebook in a big way. Diaspora, being launched in October this year, is a decentralised social networking site that provides an alternative to facebook's centralised "spying for free" kind of approach. Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or "pod") to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs and other social data. The developers argue that people give up their privacy by using facebook and that when you give up that data, you’re giving it up forever. The value facebook provides is negligible they say, in the scale of what they are doing. Diaspora promises to deliver a social networking platform that doesn't compromise our privacy rights. With over $200,000 in start up donations Diaspora could possibly be the next facebook.
I'm happy for the developers of Diaspora. Anything that protects the rights of it's users is a good thing. I'm still concerned though, that I will have yet another online space to maintain!! It's double entry madness.. I've got my facebook personal, facebook fan page, myspace, blogger blogs, normal email, work email, rachaelbyrnes.com website, mail chimp email list, folk alley open mic page and triple J unearthed page. At least I don't have twitter!!
It's getting ridiculous and it's an irony laughing at me as I write on this less is more blog. I've got to do something about it. One thing is to return here to my blogs, and write some genuine content rather than something banal like "just ate pasta" which sadly gets a lot of comments on facebook.
So here I am and I'm committing to an interesting post coming up next about my new Green PC... a recycled PC made from old computer parts. It cost me $170 and I'm totally happy with it.. It's a great initiative.. Article coming soon!
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