Tom Morris

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Due to the dissertation monster, I've not been blogging from the firehose very much. I get back and what do I find? Robert Scoble and all the TechMeme goofballs discussing whether RSS is dead. Christ, don't these people have lives? Kent Newsome is right on here: to say RSS is dead presumes that it was at some point alive. Life is not a property I associate with XML syndication standards.

I don't know if anyone remembers Ceefax back in the day. They broadcast two slightly different variants of Ceefax on BBC 1 and 2. BBC 1 had 'speed' Ceefax, which made sure it got information out quickly, while BBC 2 promised 'depth'. The tech blogosphere has chosen speed.

What makes RSS dead? Oh, "real-time" services. Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed. The key measure of a technology is how quickly it can take 140 characters of text and move it from your fingers to the world. Gee whiz, who gives a fuck?

How about finding something interesting to say and not worrying how quickly it gets delivered? Isn't that part of becoming a grown, mature adult?

The more time I spend on Twitter, the more I romanticise the book and the letter. Horses for fucking courses.

So, the latest dispatch from the tech blogosphere: everyone's still obsessed with stupid bullshit until the next bit of Apple-branded kit comes out. Then we'll go back to arguing about whether or not syndication formats are alive or not, and whine about how we are all being repressed by our iPhones because they won't let us listen to Spotify (oh wait), about "augmented reality" (sadly not: it's just taking iPhone camera pictures and sticking a fucking alpha channel over the top with some scraped Google Maps data). Can someone find some gullible VCs to fund Internet pet food suppliers or boo 2.0 or something? This shit is really dull.

Fuck all this. I'm off to get the train.

Warning, warning: this post about social media is actually good. I know, it's shocking. But it's important: the primary problem with many people on the Internet is they see disagreement as being an inherently bad thing, when in fact it's only sometimes a bad thing. It gets reinterpreted as "drama" or as a "flame war" or maybe even as "trolling". That's not to say that dramas, flame wars and trolling don't exist, but sometimes a disagreement is just that: a disagreement. And it's a mighty fine thing. If nobody can disagree with one another in a meaningful way, and dissent is socially weeded out, that has profoundly bad epistemic consequences. The same process you use to rid yourself of trolls, flamers and lamers also gets rid of honest, well-meaning people who just don't share your presuppositions.

Seeing how a community handles disagreement is a pretty good heuristic for figuring out whether that community is worth bothering with. If disagreement gets brushed under the carpet or gets written off as just drama, that means that the actual sources of the disagreement don't get looked at. In science, in the humanities and other academic fields, disagreement is a useful tool. It's useful because it opens up new questions, new hypotheses, new possible theories. Drama is seen as bad, but it's good. Without drama, literature, film, TV, theatre and so on would really suck. One thing that both the geek community and academic philosophy get right: they tolerate and feed off different opinions. I'm just about to submit a long dissertation that's filled with disagreement. Big disagreement on fundamental things: whether or not we can reliably know about the world, whether or not we can coherently hold to a belief in material properties while also holding to the scientific method. But I respect all the people I disagree with in the paper (actually, I don't: there is one person I use as an example of real weasel-like dishonesty - the guy is a lawyer by training - an exception that proves the rule). When I first become acquainted with arguments I disagree with, my initial reaction is usually "they must be crazy!". But they aren't. They just disagree with me. Rather than quibbling about their motives, we simply need to move on and figure out what our disagreements are, and let the arguments flow.

This bit is particularly true: In the Social Media realm there seems to be this need to put on a face of everything is positive and those nasty little negative people are only an aberration. The primary reason for this of course is because Social Media is the current golden child of the Internet and there are a lot of people investing their futures in it which means having to paint a pretty picture in order to make it palatable for companies because we all know this is where the money is when it comes to making a living.

Relentless positivity is what you need if you want to reach the truly holy grail of getting a contract to write a book about blogging about social media. If you want to be a social media consultant, you have to be an optimist. Young, fresh, enthusiastic! To do social media, you've got to think Twitter is going to fundamentally shake everything up, and OMG isn't it so exciting rather than thinking Twitter is a kinda fun service where you can tell your friends the answer to the question 'What are you doing?'.

If you don't mind me quoting myself from FriendFeed: You know those Ned Flanders-like families where everybody smiles and doesn't resolve any of their disagreements because that would be 'too negative': that's social media.