DG WORD

In the whole scheme of this new internet, social networking, social media, Facebook, Digg, reddit, Stumble Upon, and the go to Google for everything-you-need-to-know-age - it’s as if we’ve created another realm in which we can subject and impose our subjectivity, trend-madness, collective-affirmation seeking ways.

The growing information-r-us platform which is the Internet today is an ongoing library, mainframe or collection of identities, products, articles, news, photographs, cultures, peoples. Indeed, internet users are becoming the collective of the next generation: those who dictate what is popular, what is not, what is cool, worthy, important and “normal.”

The markers of what’s hot and what’s not? Traffic stats, search results, and page ranks (a la Alexa.com or Google Analytics) tells you whether your site is popular or worthy of being looked at. Facebook tells you if you are more/less popular depending on how many friends you may have, gifts you have received, or wall posts you’ve gotten in the past week. This article: With Friends Like These: The Politics of Facebook in Chronogram Magazine by Tom Hodgkinson - gives a 6 page extension of this paragraph.

Sites like Digg and reddit tell you whether the information you’ve submitted is interesting enough for others to read or peruse - a voting system based on democracy, but seems increasingly more like a a subjective popular contest rather than anything near to “objectivity.” (But this might just be coming from the suppressed cynical and political philosophy major in me).

Point and case of why “I don’t know why I Digg” it. Here are 2 articles submitted to Digg on the same day, as shown below:

2 Diggs & total pageviews as of today: 217.

Interesting title - who doesn’t think twice when they read “Snail Porridge” or “Best Food in the World.” Description, equally compelling with “yuck” and “Oyster and Passion Fruit Jelly” in title format to eye-catch. Image: unknown substance on green gook. Worthy of a click thru, right?

8 Diggs & total pageviews as of today: 145.

Decidedly boring title, interesting only to Toronto residents looking for time to waste at work on Monday afternoon. Article of equally boring quality, full of statistics, numbers, and foreign conference titles. Realistic content description - honest and to the point: get great deals on a link found at the bottom of this page. No image, not even of Toronto. No eye catching attempts.

All of this, which leads me to conclude: I’m really not sure if I digg it.

. . .but I think these monsters have been created and have grown to such a point where if you’re in this industry, you have to get over it and play by the rules nonetheless - whether it’s Google’s rules, or Digg’s, or Facebook’s.