Absolute Carmel

Tweeting as breathing: are you worth a read?

In the world of print writing was a virtue. People who would write and publish were the ones who had something interesting to say. A text would have to be worth a read. Similarly, an image would normally be art, it will be upheld to an aesthetic standard and convey a message. However, online conversations and picture sharing cannot be treated the same way because they’re not texts or images anymore, but the building blocks of (virtual) reality.

Many bloggers bash teenagers for creating foolish colorful blogs with dozens of pictures of them goofin’ with their friends, whereas their writing resorts to “school is boring” complaints or “got nothing to say but just wanted to update and say hi” posts. I’ve often read bloggers wonder: with all due respect to the long tail concept, why would someone read something so remotely interesting? And why would you even blog when you’ve got nothing to say?

everyone has a right to produce and reproduce

As texts in print culture, most of our online content would be inconceivable; no one would bother publishing such texts and images under any circumstances. But in digital culture everyone writes and photographs not because we’re all artists, but because this is our new realm of experience and our new inhabitance space. We’re all entitled to a body, to breathe, to be present and occupy space. People don’t have to be interesting in order to deserve a place in the world; they could just be and we would never wonder why they exist in the first place.

In the beginning of the 20th century many people appeared in movies as extras and loved watching themselves appear on screen, they felt everyone had a right to be represented, mechanically reproduced. it is no coincidence that our biological right to reproduce uses the same word as our freedom-of-speech “right” to produce and digitally reproduce images and represent ourselves in the new medium.

It is the same with online presence in digital spaces only that our embodiment in these spaces is through texts and images. We don’t have to write something worthy of reading, since writing is like breathing. We’ve already recognized online writing as speech but what is speech if not a form of breathing? Through your online activity you say or show “I’m here” and it’s enough, you don’t have to communicate anything but your presence. So much of our online conversation is pathic but i argue that a good portion of our content is too.

Your writing can be impulsive and unedited like your spontaneous speech, your spelling can be a disaster in the same way you’re not obliged to be beautiful and perfect. Letters are your avatar now so they mean much more than speech; they’re how you move and perform yourself in this space too.

it’s no longer documenting experience, it is IT

Every once in a while someone says the net is boring and the majority of its content is crap, and I say: of course. So is life. And life is on the web now. We experience it not only through our bodies but also through technology: we tweet during an experience and take a picture and share it, as part of experience. it’s no longer a documentation of it, it is IT.

We all deserve to occupy space online, to breathe. Thus, Evaluations of quality of any sort are completely irrelevant. The only relevant question for online content is if you care about someone enough to witness his experience, as boring as it may be.

How many of you who read this through, did it because you assumed I’ve got something interesting to say, and how many did it because they care about me as a person and enjoy the thoughts and experiences I share?

Tags: blogging, breathing, digital reproduction, digital writing, expirience, freedom of speech, online embodiment, online speech, presence, representation, twitter, virtual reality