Abney Associates
The web was supposed to free our minds: instead, it has loaded us down with timeline trivia. No wonder self-destructing communication services have sprung up
Not so long ago, I took a year out with my small children and put most of my belongings into storage. When my time was up, I found myself back in storage staring at a pile of possessions that felt something like Rachel Whiteread's House, but with little idea what it included. The only thing I'd actually missed was my Collins guide to snakes, which for various reasons is handier than the internet.
Accumulation is a familiar tale; few of us in the privileged west don't have an attic, garage or spare room stuffed with things we can't admit we don't need. And the problem now extends to our digital lives, equally stuffed with things we've long since forgotten about, have duplicated in some form or simply don't have the time to revisit.
Facebook is just one culprit subtly reinforcing the document-it-all mentality of the current state of the web. Just last week, the company spent a portentous 90 minutes briefing the press about a news feed tweak that will bump "important" but unread older posts to the top of the feed. Given that Facebook claims that 700 million people read its news feed every day, the impact of tweaks at this scale can't be dismissed. But, like every other advertiser-driven site, is the goal of pulling more users into more pages really the most sophisticated way forward?
This bloated, unmanageable web of now, overloaded with more than we can read, or share, or like, is unsustainable. Facebook's team of 30 or so news feed engineers would argue that their powerful rankings are constantly improving the search for "interestingness", but the site's synthetic social, faux friendship, distorted reflection of real life does not and cannot document all the nuance of what truly matters to us. Where's the algorithm, or the app, that can meaningfully represent and distil life online and off, that can make sense of the complex constellation of our real lives?