Life as Instant Replay, Over and Over Again - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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although I think about the Web as a real-time organism, most of the time the organism is obsessing about what happened earlier that day, or week.
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The replay Web coexists with the real-time Web, the phrase often used to describe sites and services, like Twitter, that let people consume information as soon as it is published.
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The rise of the replay Web is more than just a coping mechanism that helps us deal with information overload. It is shaping the way we consume, process and share information, and could potentially influence the businesses that are built on it.
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“Our consumption of content isn’t synchronous,” he said. “Things are interesting to a small group, a cluster of friends or on Reddit — then they die.” He continued: “Then they pick up and go massive. There are these little ripple effects all around the Web, little waves that converge in a pool and make big waves.”
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THERE are other signs to indicate a replay aesthetic is coming to the Web. For example, the latest version of the iPhone’s mobile software will include the ability to capture video in slow motion.
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The way we use technology could be reshaping our sense of time and urgency. Douglas Rushkoff, the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” describes present shock as the stupefaction that overtakes people as they try to keep up with the never-ending onslaught of status updates, photo feeds and looping videos constantly refreshing before their eyes.
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present shock keeps us suspended in a state of constant disarray, and causes us to prioritize the recent over the relevant and the new instead of the most important.
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the medium of the loop — either in a GIF, a short clip posted to Vine, or Instagram photo- and video-sharing applications — has become a crucial framework for transmitting information. It mimics the way we remember — by repetition — and future tools could make use of that to understand not only how we transmit information but also how we retain it.
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Perhaps the replay Web, by allowing us to constantly revisit and reconsider the recent past, can help us find new meaning in it.