I feel like a failure.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens.

Gone are the days when news would come neatly-distilled 24 hours after it occurred. TV channels still break with their programming for coverage of the very biggest “breaking stories”, sure, but on the web, it seems, everything is “breaking news”, 24 hours a day.
This is a new world. Even 5 years ago during the September 11th attacks – undoubtedly this new century’s biggest story so far – most of us got our news from rolling TV coverage. There was no flickr to receive “on the ground” photos from amateurs, no youtube for instant video. The obvious places to get news – bbc.co.uk, cnn.com – collapsed under the weight of traffic. If the same thing happened again we would be awash in distributed eyewitness reports and coverage within minutes.

This is by no means a bad thing, but it offers us interesting challenges for the future. How can any one user consolidate this massive, fragmented information stream into a coherent narrative? And how can we facilitate the desire to create “instant accounts”?

At an extreme, it’s easy to envision cameras with on-board GPS, WiFi/bluetooth and integrated keyboards so that events can be captured, meta-data added and the whole package uploaded in real-time.

But what about the more mundane life-events? A small conference in San Mateo, or a weekend trip to the beach? In pre-digital days these were private moments. Photos would be developed weeks or months later, added to paper albums perhaps months after that. Brought out and shared occasionally at family events.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this model – at the end of the day, few people care about my experience of Maker Faire, or the time I visited Alcatraz with my sister.

But still, the immediacy of this new connected world nags at me. I can share these things, instantly, with family, friends, strangers. And because it’s possible, I want it.

In time, technology will probably make these things easier. And meanwhile, I guess we just have to rely on making time, on dedication, and on that nagging sense of failure.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 4:58 pm .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Geeking, Trends and culture.
Supernerds with RSS readers will probably wet their pants over the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are thousands of articles on this very subject all over the internet. 39% of them are cleverly-disguised attempts to sell you little blue pills, 26% of them lead inevitably to a badly-researched, logically inconsistent Wikipedia article and 5% are written in an ancient Navajo dialect which is only spoken by 2 professors. The remaining 30% are, like this one, of very little interest to anyone besides their original author (and even he's a bit bored by it).