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Antony Mayfield

2013: The Year 'the Stream' Crested - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282202

Stream bnstories streams stock_and_flow attention media to_blog

shared by Antony Mayfield on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • There are great reasons for why The Stream triumphed. In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things. And now the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.  Nowness also transmits this sense of presence, of other people, that you get in a city when you go to a highway overpass and look down at all the cars at any time of the day or night. Things are happening. I am not alone. Look at all this. 
  • Schonfeld cited Betaworks CEO John Borthwick's thinkpiece, "Distribution Now," which he wrote in April of 2009, just as all this was really getting going. Borthwick concludes his post on the rise of The Stream with two quotes from musician Brian Eno. The old (and better) one begins like this: "In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. "
  • I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished. 
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  • Take Netflix's decision to release ALL of House of Cards at once. People were flabbergasted! How could they sacrifice the nowness?!  But they did and people loved it. In contrast to live "appointment viewing," of a weekly show, House of Cards felt different, substantial. It was a weighty object that could be watched however you wanted to. 
  • Or take Snapchat and the Snowden-NSA revelations. They highlight a pernicious aspect of this metaphor: while the stream flows quickly past you, it flows into the vast, searchable reservoirs of companies and intelligence agencies. This stream is archived and data mined! On the Internet stream, you cannot keep up with the stream, but the stream can keep up with you. The NSA took advantage of this. 
  • On the tiniest level, many people (myself included) have been launching little e-mail newsletters. I've been writing into the stream for seven years, and I haven't had this much fun in a long time. My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it. 
  • Snapchat says: If we can't disappear completely, let's leave as little of a trace as possible. Let's be water vapor, a passing fog, not the stream. 
  • Lastly, look at the huge viral successes of the year, Upworthy, ViralNova, TwentyTwoWords, FaithIt, and all the rest. They take advantage of the structure of the stream and the psychological problems it makes for people. These sites traffic in narrative porn. The whole point of their posts is that they are idealized stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They provide closure. They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath.
  • So the simple answer is that there's too much flow and not enough stock. The Internet could rebalance away from the flow (i.e. the stream) and start making more durable things. 
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