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A defining psychic feature of the Internet is its immediacy, its urgency, its implicit demands on our time. Hereisthisthingyoushouldseerightnow. Alsothatthingisacatvideo.

That one feature, Internet as scheduler, shapes the web as a social space. Because the same tendency that makes 20 minutes a long time to take to reply to an email, and two minutes a long time to reply to a tweet, also means that, generally, the content that lives on it has an extraordinarily short shelf life. And that’s true not just of “content” as in news stories, the stuff that loses most of its value when the term “new” no longer applies to it. It’s also true of content as a more general category: long stories, deeply reported narratives, richly researched essays — stuff that aims to endure. The stock of the Internet. 

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"Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love."

"In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder."

"I attend a lot of conference and events, so I have collected my fair share of visual summaries over the years. But I have never received one without directly participating in an event. Nobody ever forwarded a set of visual notes to me via email. I have never seen visual notes show up in my news feed. If the idea behind creating these visual summaries is that the core concepts expressed at some conference, summit or gathering will be more easily remembered, shared, and applied to work going forward, and they were performing as intended, then I would expect to see the visual summaries everywhere. I would expect that people would reference them more – or at all – in their work, across social media… anywhere. That simply isn’t happening."

"the evilest thing that Google has ever done is put that red box on the search-results page. Every Google search now says to me: “we know you’re in the middle of searching for something, but we think that you might instead like to immediately know that somebody that you don’t know has followed you on Google+, so we’ve made a bright red box — the most eye catching and animated thing on the page, just so you know.” Google’s not doing this because Google+ has actual, relevant information that requires my immediate attention. If they were interested in that, they’d give me actual control over what goes into that red box, or give me the ability to shut it off entirely. No — they’re doing this because they want me to use Google+ more, so that they can say that they boosted “user engagement on Google+” on their next earnings call. Besides being disrespectful to your attention, notifications like this do something else that’s much more nefarious: they train you to be a passive consumer of information rather than an active one. If we don’t control the notifications we’re receiving, we’re forced to react to them: from Google’s big red box, to Living Social’s notification for a deal on backwaxing. Left at the default, we create an economy of sensational notifications, with the brightest minds of our generation trying to figure out how to get us to click on the next command for our attention. Can you imagine what would happen if they were instead focused on providing us content worthy of it?"

"If none of us ever had to work, I think that our activities would cluster into three areas: art, interpersonal interaction and discovery (science, academic research, curiosity). While this is a much longer discussion, I worry that our community is aiming to make technology and content consumption our primary activity, instead of helping us engage in these creative and personal endeavors."

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How does email have such staying power?

Email is still the killer app. It looks great on all your devices and the user experience is always exactly what you’ve come to expect. Look at the rise of Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket. People love plain, glorious, readable text. Email is also a technology that everyone understands, and it’s personal (if someone wants to respond to me, all they have to do is hit reply). Tweets and status updates flow by and disappear into the black hole that is the Internet of five minutes ago. Interesting links and stories you find in an email newsletter are always right where you left them.

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