#alwayson is a series of short text pieces by Trevor H Smith, this being the first.
“One day I’m going to build my own house, and it will look like a ruined castle.”
“web 2.0″, (has) propelled millions of people around the world to willingly share personal information without any means of controlling who received it or how it will be used.”[1]
“Equally remarkable has been the willingness demonstrated by millions of us to document and reveal our own behaviour and the behaviour of others, in personal photos and video clips posted in blogs and online diaries.”[2]
He grew up during 2.0, and has’ come of age alongside the emergence of web 3.0. To User3bn, the concept of ‘online’ is a thing of the past, from his childhood. Now a man, he is always on; at arm’s reach to a thousand friends, relatives and acquaintances. He is not yet old enough to pre-emptively mourn the passing of 3.0, as it gives way to web 4, 5 and 6.0: a time when search engines react to conversationally structured questions, spoken directly to the web, and when screens are as flexible as newsprint; a time when the web itself is everyone’s 1001st friend. He has considered such technology, but assumes it will happen in a matter of years, rather than decades.
Online IS offline, the two have merged, and while his parent’s generation – a generation that recalls a time when the internet was ‘fast approaching’ – has learned how the great technological leap of their lifetime has improved their daily lives, and they have absorbed it with ease, User3bn’s generation was born into, and consequently absorbed by it.
He uploads photographs from his daily life to his news feed – his friends tell him how to feel about the things he has posted, and he returns the favour later on, when they upload their own daily images. He never edits – everything goes into the album, including shots decapitating the sitter, blurred motion shots, and shots containing more thumb than object of image. Still his friends congregate around them, and the out of focus thumb that covers 70% of the image becomes a thing in itself, and is tagged into a folder celebrating everyone else’s thumbshots. No-one ever rotates their images before or after uploading them, most of us are viewing them on hand-held devices anyway.
He can sum up how he feels in two or three words. ‘Who needs 140 characters when you’ve got the hash-tag’. And he never asks the question ‘why publish this?’ more likely he would ask ‘why not publish this?’
Without apps, certain aspects of self-definition and collective definition of his culture would be impossible. Apps allow him to instantly reproduce, represent and manipulate that culture, narrating all the while with tags and categories. Today his top three clips are; ‘I love mew’ in which a cat appears to say ‘I love you’ to its owner; ‘Brutal but still lolled’ in which a middle-eastern man is flogged in the street for reasons undisclosed in the clip; and, ‘Tulisa sex tape is real’, which is fairly self-descriptive.
[1] Judith O Richards & Benjamin Weil, ‘The New Normal’, iCI, 2008, p9
[2] Judith O Richards & Benjamin Weil, ‘The New Normal’, iCI, 2008, ‘Foreword’, p1
