Jan 5, 2009
Notes on the timestamp
Social media is great. It gives us an opportunity to interact with others, to exchange opinions and experiences. What I found so engaging about videoblogging in 2004, before youtube, before the mass hysteria, was the ability to look at a video made by someone and really get a glimpse of their world. In terms of political dialogue, videoblogging could be a way to open up, of letting people who are living in the outskirts of the media sphere express their opinion to their local community. It was also a way for us to expand our range of sympathies, to get that closer connection with others. Others you might not stop and talk with on the street, or at a social gathering. A typical example of this is the sites made for/with homeless people. Arenas where they can express their world, their challenges and their joys in life.
At a certain point, its as if the focus shifted. The social element is still there, but the narcissistic elements of it have become too dominant in a way. It became a bit too much like marketing, or advertising. When mass media covered youtube back in 2005 or 06, it was mostly about how this or that person was reaching an audience of millions. The long tail, so to speak, was rarely the focus. Many people who posted a few videos on youtube and then saw that they were having view counts like 64 or 1342 were disappointed. They felt like making a video for ten people was not enough.
We have all turned to being broadcasters now. We broadcast, we beep and tweet out messages to the void, the intarwebs, and then we get some feedback from the void. A comment to our blog entry, or a video to our video, or a @ reply on twitter. Conversation begins maybe. Feedback loop is enabled and goes for a bit, then stops.
This leads me to the tyranny of the timestamp. The fact that the timing of conversation enabling techniques is SO important. It’s a hit and miss, and the structure of the system, the requirements of the media, forces us to move on. Your tweet written last night has much less relevance today, simply because the timestamp has changed. The context of you writing it might not have changed, the importance of the subject might not have changed, but the timestamp immediately treats it as outdated. Yesterday’s news, so to speak.
The Norwegian sociologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen wrote a book about time some years ago, and I remember attending a presentation he did at the University of Bergen after it had been published. I remember clearly his way of describing the problem. How our media consumption is affecting our relation to time. Our time.
It acts like a disease, now. A plague that spreads. Our attention span keeps getting shorter, and there are different psychological blocks, or habits, that strengthen it.
One style of the videos I have made in the past have been a commentary on this, or rather an exploration of it. You have a video, with 24 frames per second, and each frame shows something new. Flashing text, images, moving parts that shred, are shredded, and reused. Creating a rhytm. Our minds are adapting and what might a few decades back have been seen as a hazard flutter of images is today seen by many to be at an acceptable speed. Our eyes are so used to the flickering and fluttering of images, from the way we consume media, that it becomes second nature.
In 1966, William Burroughs and a few others made a video called The Cut-Ups, of which you can see a small sample here. (Here you can read more generally about cut-up technique).
There are several layers to time, and we are only consciously aware of a few of them. There is the actual clicking of time, the seconds going one after another. There is perceived time as we consciously appreciate it, and as our body organism sees it. There is time gone, and time that is to come. What happens when we are given something - be it a text, or a video, or a newspaper clip - and we are given no information about its timestamp? Without the timestamp layer in the middle of our consciousness. We might read it, or watch it, and notice things. Some things.
Then, we are given the date. This newspaper article is five months old. That video is 3 years old. That blog post is 2 weeks old. Our perception of the piece is changed immediately. I dont have much data on this, no statistics to back it up, but there is something there.
I have had a conversation with Michael Meiser about this - what is your thoughts? How does this relate to your own interest in google reader and linkblogging? Remember our del.icio.us experiments a few years back?
I am also interested in the work of Adam Quirk and the others at Wreck & Salvage. Here is the latest W&S video:
Fun with Muybridge from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo.
What does naked people have to do with our feedback loop?
Man that wreck and salvage video is great. It’s such a simple combination (though possibly very hard to edit) of a single piece of music with a particular kind of footage. 1+1, but the results are indescribably unique. I’m sure others interpret it deferently but to me the sound is of a nostalgia for a grand era, which seems to make a satire or sarcastic comment on the footage. Sort of a “yeah, this was the best of us. you think what you do is any better? ha! your’re naive.”
We’re all walking with our own timestamps, everything is. We have evidence of our stamps in our passports, drivers licenses; trees have their growth rings, iron has it’s rust. I don’t really think of it as a tyranny, though I can see how a lot of people do. You, Raymond, of all people should understand the importance of a creation within it’s timeframe, and the importance of bringing it out of it’s context, or recontextualizing it, as you put it. So much to say here. Everything we do online is given the stamp, from this comment, to that video I just posted. We’re leaving trails of our online existence. Bottomunion hasn’t been changed in months, gathering digital dust, existing as a library of a time you mentioned before, preYoutube so to speak, and that’s fine with me. It’s the shit cycle, food, eat, shit, grow, food, eat, shit…or the death cycle, nothing is wasted.
valid points
I even removed dates from my blog for awhile thinking that might help.’
It didn’t
audience is a luxury
You must do for yourself
and mayBe, someone will view or read it
But at least you got it out there
You weren’t silent like the rest
Thank you for your always thoughtful and inspiring posts. They’re deeply interesting to me, because, I think, I am in the process of finding some of the same balances in my life.
I am split two ways on this. Timestamps (and other ways of fixating and collecting data in relation to time) are important because they firmly fixate our digital footprints in a context. We even has the ability to analyze that context in great detail, and therefore we can learn a great deal about our readers using tools at our disposal, such as web analytics tools.
Whether a blog post or another item of information is found, read or digested at or shortly after it’s time of posting, or not, is a matter of the type of architecture used to recover it. A lot of the tools we use suck. Search sucks, because it relies too heavily on “new” information. Twitter sucks, because, again it operates with a timeline only. But other entrances exist. Tags such as used by del.icio.us is a truly great way to filter and find items, which doesn’t rely too much on time. Popularity over time used as a filtering mechanism can be more or less meaningless.
What I guess I am trying to say is, that what the type of architecture emphasize, helps you in some ways, and blocks you in other ways. Whether the timestamp becomes an enemy or a friend, depends on your choice of tool, your choice of software. If you don’t like the tools you use, you can replace them, or develop new tools. Our hands are not tied on this.
Thank you Raymond for a very interesting blog/vlog/vog. I enjoy reading it since ‘ages’ - or at least since somewhen/somewhere back in 2004.
You run a rather long or dark perspective in your recent posts (this one and http://dltq.org/2009/02/26/the-luxury-of-privacy/) yet I can somehow agree on your concerns and discomfort concerning the hunt and hype for one or another type of actuality.
Yet, on the other hand, don’t you think that our ‘new’ sharing culture soon has reached the point where ‘novelty’ is just this… novelty. And where friends are friends and information is information - or where information simply… is.?
Although the time-span from today back to the first blog is rather short, I do enjoy it ‘already now’ to visit blogs (new ones, those I followed since a long time ago or those newly discovered ‘old’ ones) and to dwell on what is ‘present’. Timestamps are in such a dwell or time lag a most welcome oddity like for instance when I today again visit your post on ‘keeping it simple’ (http://dltq.org/2004/12/28/keeping-it-simple/) - gee, that was in 2004!!!
Novelty - with its tools of novelty - is just a bore, I agree very much on that. Novelty disturbs and does only provoke a hype (speak: another novelty). Twitter sucks and so does the idea of putting culture into 140 characters… Yet, it is still for us to discover what the new information-topography really does contain for us to surf on, dwell on and grow on - and that beyond the notion of the ‘new’.
The new media is probably still too young in order for us to overcome the idea of its novelty (and to link it to the idea of producing actuality) and it will take some more time until we’re able to adapt its true organic and vital nature. When that moment has arrived, timestamps will be the only structuring value of that otherwise completely open and free landscape.
Without the architecture of the timestamp there would be no space made distinct and everything would remain without form, character and content. The Timestamp is the new Gutenberg. If only people could stop ‘NOT writing comments on my own blogspot’…!
…
and thank you very much for crossposting the lovely ‘fun with muybridge’-video from wreckandsalvage!! I missed it on their site and thanks to you I once more am reminded of their enjoyable work!
Greetings from Oslo
b.k./LOMEG_ROM