Two articles necessary for this blog entry (and anyone interested in modern internet theory in general): here and here.

I mentioned in a previous post that not everyone has the privilege of being heard. This differs in a pre-digital society, in which if you had the ability to speak, people had to hear you (barring earplugs or a hurricane). In a digital society, everyone has the ability to speak, but getting heard is a completely different project. For example, in order to speak on Slashdot (the infamous techie hub), one must only login and comment. After a comment has been made, however, that comment is assessed by other users and is assigned an evolving numerical rank from -1 to 5 (-1 being flamebait, 5 being very good). Comments can reach a 5 on different merits – informative, funny, etc.

I was hanging around with a friend last night, poking about on the internet (the fact that surfing the net is social activity...can of worms I'm not going to tackle at the moment), and found a youtube video someone had linked to. Nothing particularly profound or interesting, an upload of a music* video, about 4 minutes long. The song was repetitive and the concept behind the video revealed itself very quickly, and I soon lost interest. My friend made a comment about short attention span.

I don't know if it's that I never really "got in to" to the whole music videos thing, or that as part of the post-mtv generation, my attention cannot be held by even the shortest of sustained stimuli.