Founder of 1938media.com and the…, puppets.
Loren Feldman is one of the loudest videobloggers I have ever seen and heard. His talk starts with an energetic tirade against the recent Wired article that claims blogs are dead which I also responded to. In his opinion blogs aren’t dead because:
The most important thing in your digital life is your personal blog. Not Facebook, not any of the studentgroups you belong to, any of that. None of that matters. The most important thing is your blog. Because that’s who you are. That’s where you have the most control. Your blog is your slice of digital heaven and nobody can fuck with you there. On Facebook and all these other places you are just a common machine. That’s all you are. Facebook doesn’t care about you, Google doesn’t care about you, frankly, I don’t care about you. Who cares about you? You care about you. And that’s why you should put all your energy into your blog.
(write-up by about:blank)
What I thought was Feldman’s most insightful reflection on blogging and social media is how he states that social media services live on and feed on your fear of being alone in this digital world which is represented in the “zero comments” phenomenon.
As human beings we want instant feedback and this is exactly what these services provide. The New York Times recently described Twitter as a form of micro-blogging which provides and contributes to “ambient awareness”
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.
Loren Feldman indeed gave an energetic tirade at Blog08. At first he seemed to be yet another rough and sour yank, but upon closer inspection the man had a wise message.
For the web is moving towards networks of decentralized asynchronous individuals, your blog is key. It’s the most personal version of ‘you’ on the web. The single place where you are in full control of the image of you.