Archived entries for twitter

Valueable recommandations
instead of fruitless rummaging.
Without Google: Day 1

[Original German Blog Post]

Yesterday, I made my mind to abandon all search engines for some time; so I would not hesitate to tell how my using the Internet is changed by that.

The most important means to get to valuable information, are my networks, Twitter at first. I would not want to get lost in a trivial eulogy on the great Web 2.0. However I have a strong feeling of security, to get all paths of the Internet that I would really want to follow, rolled out for me by my peer-group’s posts.

For the first time I bothered to watch in detail which links I would get recommended in my Twitter-timeline. Until now I had presumed that I would have clicked more or less at random on the one or the other link. To get a more objective picutre I now archived every link that I would see as worth following in a list.

After adding came the surprise: I had in deed looked on about half of the Links from my timeline! Hardly there is any Spam. In fact, behind the links there lie almost always articles worth reading or pictures, that at least I would find funny. This efficiency in supplying content I find remarkable.

Here is the list of links, that I would have judged relevant to follow yesterday evening:

… and tomorrow it will go on. Also I am looking forward on the parallel report of @dasrhizom!

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Fostering Slowness

The real innovation blogging brought to our media landscape has never been real-time. No, the most important difference between “regular” websites or portals and blogs is their archive and the beautiful possibilities for fostering slowness (philosopher Odo Marquard coined the phrase “Langsamkeitspflege” for a very similar concept).

When German blogger and journalist Don Dahlmann wrote three years ago, “one really should create an overview of the German blog scene because very much will be lost very fast”, I started the Blog History Project. This project aims at preserving the early history of blogging in Germany.

The projects extends from the first beginnings of blogging 14 years ago – among the pioneers were Robert Braun, Cybertagebuch and Moving Target – through the first Wave of Blogging in 2001 that even got noticed in some newspapers, up to the great blogging euphoria in the mid-2000s. Now, it already has been three years since I started the project, but the most exciting observation is: almost all blogs and their archives are still available. So, maybe we do not lose as much as we may have thought.

Everytime I ventured into the field of oral history, I learned, that key elements of urban infrastructure such as post offices, where almost every citizen went many times a year, month or week to withdraw money, send letters or look up phone numbers, are kept in collective memory for about 10 years after they had been torn down.

Sometimes there is not even a single photograph showing the buildings – in spite of (or maybe: because of) their banality. Paradoxically some of them are documented only on Twitter, a medium very frequently criticized for its banality and fleetingness. I suppose there are more pictures of the beautiful 1950s Aschaffenburg station on Twitter than in the building authority’s archives.

We will probably stilll read our blogs in 20 years and browse their huge historical archives, while political real-time characters such as Ursula von der Leyen (called “Zensursula” by her web-savvy opponents) and former president Horst Köhler slumber in dusty, cobwebby corners of the Wikipedia. And that’s certainly not the worst development.

I can only recommend the highly informative book by Florian Aicher and Uwe Drepper about architect Robert Vorhoelzer, the most important figure of the Bavarian postal architectural office in the 1920s, who planned many of the postal buildings pictured in this article.

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Schoenheit von Vogelsang

“Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it.”
Many sympathise with the cold panic of information hell that New York Times’ author and correspondent George Packer associates with Twitter, like he describes in his blog post; last but not least the fugatiousness of twitter is something wonderful as well as frightening: nothing seems of value, nothing of lastingness.

“Education needs time – and that is lacking in the Net”, says philosopher Markus Gabriel in an interview on FAZ.net – and on Twitter, on might want to add, is immediate transientness even baked into the system – Twitter’s own search itself does only reach two days back into the past. All the beautiful thoughts sink so quickly into the depth of the time line that we would like to stay; but a storm is blowing from Paradise that drives us irresistibly into the future.

If we regard Twitter as news channel, I can comprehend Parker’s panic very well. Every bit of news that has reached me (by Re-Tweet) for the second time seems outdated, somehow no longer relevant. And how desperate if even the absolute media-mainstream gets replicated by Re-Tweet, like today: “Man Resigns On Twitter per Haiku”.

However just this notice leads us to something in Twitter that is beautiful and valuable: lyrics and aphorism, beauty in linguistic cautiousness. The remarkable with Sun’s CEO’s resigning is not that he proclaimed it by Twitter. Twitter is the most efficient channel for declarations of that kind – that’s all over town, been told by the host of social media experts for years. Remarkable is that Jonathan Schwartz chooses the meter of the Haiku. Brief real poems or exclamations resonating in their syllables are the beauty of Twitter for me. An update like “Mars can be seen all night” might have a factual background in astronomy. But regarded as solitary verse, the six monosyllabic words become a myth in which we get sight of the God of War, victorious over the realm of Neith.

If you do not just see Twitter as a short messaging service but take the metaphor “twitter” serious, the never ending deluge of text looses its terror – it no longer information but becomes in deed music, a stream you may drift away.

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awaken’d flowers—
All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh—thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
(Shelley, To a Skylark)

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