An Internet Life

This is an article I wrote back in 2007 and didn’t publish at the time.  I feel its more relevant today than ever.

11/13/2007

Having spent the best part of my weekend moving my music, photos and video from my old PC to my new mac, I came to the conclusion that my generation (I’m 36) is already outdated.  It wasn’t that i was feeling particularly old, or that i couldn’t handle the software transition.  Far from it, I love working with computers and software.  It was how i organise my computer life, when compared to the younger generation. This got me thinking about my media consumption in a broader sense.  My generation was trained to organise its world into folders and not streams.

Now indulge me for a moment………..

Lets look at some examples of what i mean.  Starting with music.  We grew up buying albums of our favourite artists, usually after hearing or buying a single from that album.  Artists in turn were instructed to produce music on mass in the form of albums, rather than individual tracks produced and distributed at the time of creation.  The iTunes or more lately Rhapsody and Pandora generations don’t purchase in the same way.  They buy or stream individual tracks based on merit and then rather than storing these tracks in folders (albums) they create playlists or personal radio stations, which are far more fluid ways to organise music.

Apply the analogy to photographs and the contrasts are even more apparent.  As children, our photos were in physical albums, then with the advent of the digital camera, we migrated to virtual albums.  We didn’t change our habits, we just changed the nature of the “folder”.  Services like flickr on the web, and iPhoto on the computer have changed even this most basic task.  Rather than moving photos into piles (folders), the software is able to index each item based on criteria such as date, key word tags, titles, and more recently location.  [UPDATE: Now facial recognition ] Again much in the same way as playlists and personalised radio have created fluid storage, these photo streams deliver our lives from as many different perspectives as we can think of.

When you look at television you can see the writing on the wall already.  Our folders were the television stations of our youth.  Our viewing habits were dictated by the broadcast networks themselves and scheduling was not controlled by us as individuals.  Its not surprising to see how the generation that manages music and memories in fluid streams, reacted to this type of media control.  Welcome YouTube and Joost.  [UPDATE: Hulu] Now viewers are controlling consumption by every conceivable theme under the sun.  Streaming the content when it suits them and not the network.

The final example is the web itself.  Sites like digg, delicious and stumbleupon [UPDATE: twitter, friendfeed] are effectively streams of content from other folders (web sites) that the reader can control and format to their own requirements.  After all why would they want to view content in such a restricting folder like format as the web site itself.  In addition to bookmarking and microbloging sites, the adoption of RSS as a means of news consumption is rapidly increasing.  Tools such as google reader, enable users to categorize hundreds of news sources and then deliver them in single streams of digestible content.