Leo Demoralized

Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006.

Recently Google Buzz stopped publishing Leo Laporte’s posts (or whatever it is that Google calls them) for reasons unexplained and Leo has become upset that no one noticed. Writes Leo:

“It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me….”

Indeed.

With all due respect to Leo, what exactly did he think people are using Twitter, Facebook, Buzz et al. for? “Social” media is perhaps the single most narcissistic system humanity has ever created. It is devoted, in its entirety, to people shouting into the void solely for their own gratification.

That we can pay attention to others at all is almost a side-effect of the publishing mechanisms (social side-effect, not a technical one). A side-effect that largely exists simply to give a semblance of utility to the publishing side.

All of this is a bad thing, as far as I can tell, only if you want – nay, expect – other people to pay attention to you. In effect, for actual narcissists a system that democratizes narcissism is truly a terrible thing: a billion people all shouting “why won’t anyone pay attention to me?” all at the same time. The horror, the horror.

(I’m picking on Mr. Laporte here a little bit but only because I suspect he simply gave voice to what many others are hand-wringing over. In fact Mr. Laporte is one of the few worth paying attention to).

But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I think Mr. Laporte might be misunderstanding what happened to him in that he’s confounding “paying attention to Buzz” with “paying attention to me”. I suspect every time he posts to Buzz thousands of people read it, absorb it, click it, re-tweet it, and then promptly forget all about it. Like they do for everyone else. But no one’s sitting around thinking “Leo hasn’t posted in a day, two days, a week – the void in my life, oh how it grows!”

He’s right in that it’s lost, but that’s only because none of it has been designed to be remembered. Why would we?