Scott Simpson tells us something I think we all desperately need to hear in his article in Issue 4 of The Magazine:

You are boring. So, so boring.

Don’t take it too hard. We’re all boring. At best, we’re recovering bores. Each day offers a hundred ways for us to bore the crap out of the folks with whom we live, work, and drink. And on the Internet, you’re able to bore thousands of people at once. […]

The Big Bore lurks inside us all. It’s dying to be set loose to lecture on Quentin Tarantino or what makes good ice cream. Fight it! Fight the urge to speak without listening, to tell a bad story, to stay inside your comfortable nest of back-patting pals. As you move away from boring, you will never be bored.

This relates really well to a recent post by Able Parris called Focus Means Ignoring:

We need to spend less time looking to others for interesting things, and start spending more time doing the things that make us interesting. […]

Similarly, and I am saying this more for myself, it’s easy to give time and attention to the things you enjoy or are easy, but true character comes when you give focus to the things that are difficult but must be done. This means you have to ignore everything else, and know that you will be better because of it.

Just imagine the virtuous cycle this could set off… As people post fewer boring things like Foursquare checkins and retweets of how awesome they are, and we all take the conscious decision to read fewer boring things and instead spend that time listening, learning, and doing new things, we could slowly and collectively pull the current state of the social web out of that cesspool of boringness. Well, that’s a pipe dream, of course. And to be fair — there’s nothing wrong with clicking on a good animated gif every once in a while.

Anyway, back to Scott’s article. One of his recommendations for fighting the descent into becoming boring is what he calls “Expanding your circles”:

When you expand your social and intellectual range, you become more interesting. You’re able to make connections that others don’t see. You’re like a hunter, bringing a fresh supply of ideas and stories back to share with your friends.

This is very much related to Mark Granovetter’s 1973 theory of weak ties1. The theory states that because a person with strong ties in a network more or less knows what the other people in the network know, the effective spread of information relies on the weak ties between people in separate networks.

In other words, to get more interesting information out of Twitter or any other social network, you need to follow people who give you access to additional knowledge clusters. If you see too many tweets about the same thing in your timeline, or if your RSS reader shows 5 consecutive links to the same tech article, you may have too many strong ties.2

Go and and find those weak ties at the edges of your interests, and strengthen them. Otherwise we’ll just continue to talk about the same stuff over and over and over again. And that’s boring.

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1. “The Strength of Weak Ties”, Mark Granovetter, 1973. PDF link. ↩

2. I wrote about this extensively in How to get more out of Twitter. ↩

The Atlantic printed an interesting interview with Clay Shirky, covering a wide range of topics like privacy, publishing, and the Internet as a distractor. Shirky argues for tempered pessimism about the oft-lamented distracting role of the Internet. Here’s why:

The other case for tempered pessimism is that the examples we have of group creation don’t rely on wholesale change — whether you are looking at examples of amateur collaboration (digitizing old ship logs, figuring out how proteins fold), sites of cultural production (Pinterest, YouTube), collaborative consumption (Freecycle, CouchSurfing) or new kinds of conversational value (Quora, Reddit). Each of these initiatives requires only a small percentage of the population to donate a small percentage of time to making or sharing to have an outsized effect.

This is, for me, the biggest driving force in our use of the cognitive surplus: considering that by the end of the 20th century, the total time spent in media consumption, with no accompanying production or sharing and even precious little annotation or discussion, is a situation so different from ours in the early 21st century.

His point is that even though we’re much more connected to media (which definitely has its drawbacks), it’s a much less passive connection than it used to be. Now we comment, like, share, and in the best case scenario, further discussions in a meaningful way. And that’s a good thing.

Dan Frommer believes that when it comes to live events, Twitter Stands Alone:

Then look over at Twitter, where the room is bursting with fresh news, links, photos from everywhere, alerts that Karl Rove is melting down or that Diane Sawyer seems wasted, jokes coming so fast that you can barely keep up. (Many of them even funny.) You control the content, the sources, the volume, the pace, and your drink. Sometimes, it’s wrong, but it’s quickly corrected, and you should be more skeptical anyway. And if you want, you can participate. You’re not just watching.

This sentiment resonates with me — especially because we don’t have cable TV at home. On election night (morning in South Africa) I went to the gym at 5:30am so I could watch CNN on the TVs there (two birds with one stone and all that). But all the TVs in the section I was in when the race was called were set to sports channels, so how did I find out who won? Twitter, of course.

Twitter is also my first port of call when there is an issue on this site, or with one of the apps I use. If my site is down, the first thing I do after running a traceroute is send a tweet to Cloudflare or Mediatemple. When Tweetbot isn’t sending push notifications, I just search for “Tweetbot notifications” to find out if it’s just me. This has been said before, but there is simply no service out there that is better for real-time search.

Ok, that was more of a Twitter love letter than I thought it would be. I’ll stop now.

Jenna Wortham shares some fascinating stories in How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal:

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become. […]

“It’s strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” [Steve Juh] said. “It’s the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”

What most people find most disconcerting is the sudden lack (and unreliability) of information. As one person said, “You had to make plans and stick to them. It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

(link via The system that breaks is not the system that repairs)

Spencer Beacock takes on those who criticize Instagram as “bad art” in Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing. He starts by redefining the purpose of the photo-sharing service:

Instagram is a tool and a model for easy, non-verbal sharing of experiential and emotional data. It is image-capturing for pseudo-ethnographic recording, rather than image-capturing for beauty or composition.

His take on the much-discussed filters is really interesting as well:

Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.

The filters are visual representations of all of the other sensory and emotional data that gets connected with the images in our minds.

Spencer gives some great examples of what he means by this, and then closes the piece with a discussion of Instagram’s role in identity creation.

Read Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing.

In August 2003 — a few months before we got married — my wife and I went on a backpacking trip through Europe. You may remember that particular summer because it was the biggest European heat wave in a hundred years or something, so there was a lot of media coverage around it. Shops in Paris ran out of fans. Sweaty, half-naked tourists packed the sreets, which I’m sure made the locals even grumpier than usual about having to cede control of their cities to a bunch of foreigners.

It was quite a trip — 8 cities in 30 days. We used a hop-on hop-off bus service and stayed in youth hostels, as you do when you have no money. It was exhausting, wonderful, eye-opening, frustrating, beautiful. I’d love to show you some photos, but that’s going to be difficult because the album is sitting on my bookshelf at home.

Taking photos was different back then. Before the trip I bought 10 rolls of 24+3 Fujifilm ISO 400 film to use with my Nikon SLR. I had to weigh the importance of every photo, because not only was film expensive, we were also going to have to get the damn things developed. Once the trip was over we spent days going through the photos, reliving the moments, carefully picking the ones we deemed worthy of being put in our album.

I page through the album often. It includes some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, during one of the most tumultuous times in my life. My memories of that time are fading slowly along with the photos, but I’ll never forget the feeling of that month.

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Last month several of my friends were in Europe on vacation. I know this because I followed their every move on Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes their photos reminded me of places we went on our trip. Sometimes I was jealous. Sometimes I just thought, wow, that’s pretty.

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I wonder what it would be like if my wife and I did our backpacking trip now, almost a decade later. I imagine that I’d spend most of my time either taking photos with my phone, or hunting for free wifi with my phone. Because if you don’t post photos of what you’re doing, it didn’t really happen, right?

In a sense I’m glad we did our big Europe trip before social networks existed. We checked our email maybe once in every city — if we could find an Internet cafe. For the most part we were on our own. Just one couple amongst a sea of tourists. There was nothing different about the bottle of wine we had in that one Italian restaurant. Except that it was our bottle of wine, and we shared it just with each other. Not with anyone else. It was a whole month of secret moments in public, and we were just… there. We didn’t check in on Foursquare, we didn’t talk about it on Facebook, we didn’t post any photos anywhere. I now look back and appreciate the incredible freedom we had to live before we all got online and got this idea that the value of a moment is directly proportional to the number of likes it receives.

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I woke up yesterday morning to a few Facebook status updates from people who don’t like Halloween, and who would never let their kids participate in the evils of trick-or-treating. I was immediately filled with guilt because I allowed my daughter to enjoy herself so much the previous night by letting her dress up in her self-chosen mermaid/fairy combination.

And then I realized that I feel like that all the time on Facebook. Guilt, anger, envy… Those are the emotions that fuel activity on most social networks, but perhaps Facebook more than the others. They’re the emotions that make us share/like/comment on things. And then I thought about our Europe trip, and how much I long for that time before we became obligated to carry the burden of the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of every single person we’re connected to online. It’s what Frank Chimero once called “huffing the exhaust of other people’s digital lives.”

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I’m not saying I’m done with Facebook — and anyway, the public Facebook breakup blog post has become such a cliché that I don’t want this to sound like one. I’m just saying that I don’t like how my Facebook newsfeed makes me feel, so I’m going to “see other people” for a while, and see how that works out. And I’m going to try to rediscover the feeling of that Europe trip from a decade ago in the lives of the people around me.

In Siamese Dream Frank Chimero addresses the differences between streaming music services (access to an unlimited number of songs) and purchasing music (ownership of a limited selection):

The way you navigate a place of abundance (streaming music) is fundamentally different than how you use a place with limitations (purchased music). In abundance, you’re looking to discover pre-existing value (“Knock my socks off!”), whereas with limitations, you’re looking to milk value (“I’ve got this thing. How can I learn to enjoy it?”).

He goes on to mention how this idea applies to most digital vs. physical environments:

Systems of abundance and limitation are not exclusive, even though we talk like they are. Digital services and technology rarely displace, but frequently add and augment. Your Twitter account didn’t replace your Facebook profile. You’re just splitting time and trying to keep both plates spinning. With digital, it is almost always AND instead of OR.

This is a huge part of our information overload problem. Imagine what would happen if you could only use one social network. Which one would you choose? What would you put there?1 We create these artificial rules about what is appropriate to share on which network, and it’s only going to get harder to keep the separations straight as more and more AND services pop up.

We spend so much time trying to figure out what each network is for, but they’re all for the same thing: human connection. We get fixated on the tools and the medium, and forget that it’s people all the way down. I’m slowly realising that the real power of any network is in the off-network experiences they enable. It’s about the point where a simple Twitter conversation moves to email and a strong friendship. It’s about the point where a discovery of mutual interests online leads to a coffee and an hour-long conversation.

This horse had been beaten to death, but I’ll say it one more time. It doesn’t matter what network(s) you use, how many followers you have2, what your Klout score is, or how Internet famous you are (or aren’t). What matters is the connections you make and the conversations you have. So what we really need is the courage to ditch AND (the place of abundance that’s about the dopamine rush of discovering new things all the time), and embrace OR (the place of limitation that’s about discovering value in the relationships that we already have).

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1. Does this hypothetical scenario make you break out in a cold sweat? Exactly… ↩

2. For a bizarre look into the underbelly of follower-chasing, check out the #teamfollowback hashtag on Twitter. ↩

Back in March I wrote about Pinterest, and how I believe it gives people the illusion that they’re creating something without the effort of actually doing the hard work. Now Clive Thompson makes a strong argument In Defense of Pinterest. He talks about the power of images to communicate emotion, and the one big way Pinterest is different from other social networks:

Indeed, part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination. “In such a self-obsessed society, this is a place where people are focusing attention on something other than themselves,” says Courtney Brennan, an avid Pinterest user.

These opposite sides of the argument aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. The critique that Pinterest is for people who “will do anything to avoid having to read” remains, but the examples cited by Clive convinced me that there is a great deal of value on the site — if you know where to look.

Nishant Kothary wrote an excellent piece about the different types of signal on social media sites, and how some networks are designed to self-police dishonest signals to such an extent that it hurts the quality of the relationships. From Why Instagram Works:

Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you’ve created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means less, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, less meaningful engagement.

This ties in really well with that Google+ conversation I wrote about the other day, about how we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with hardship on social network sites.

(link via @ChrisFerdinandi)

I often see posts from people who return from Internet sabbaticals proclaiming that they made an unexpected discovery — they didn’t really miss anything because nothing important happened while they were away. I don’t think that is an honest assessment of the offline experience. A more accurate description is that whenever you spend a significant amount of time offline, you miss almost everything — but that’s ok.

I just spent about 10 days with very minimal online interaction because we had a newborn in the hospital. I caught up on some reading today and realised that I missed a lot of great stuff. It made me anxious for a while — until I realised that the “I didn’t miss anything” crowd might just be a little bit caught up in their own reality distortion fields.

The secret to a healthy and balanced online life that doesn’t give you FOMO when you’re offline is not to deny that you’re going to miss a bunch of great stuff while you’re gone. The secret is to take a deep breath and realise that it’s ok to let the vast majority of information pass you by, as long as you really take in the things that matter. Don’t just retweet. Internalise. Write. Think. Figure out how the words apply to you. Make the time count, and then surrender the rest:

Surrender is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

Or as Chris Bowler so eloquently puts it:

If the quality is there, I’m thrilled to be weaned down on my quantity.

This is the only way I know how to make peace with the fact that everything happens while I’m offline.