Convergence
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Lawrence Lessig has been hailed as a man of brilliance and vision. With his recent innovation of e-mail bankruptcy, I am convinced.
I have unreturned e-mail going back almost two years now, and I blame the iPhone. I used to come home, check my e-mail, and respond to the most pressing items right away. Now, I can read my e-mail wherever I am. I can deal with the contents mentally, but I’m not always in a position to respond right away. When I get home now, I look at all of my new e-mail and say “Oh, I read those already.”
I’ve noticed a similar convergence/replacement effect with Facebook. Once I joined, I all but stopped blogging. A daily status update to my 200 closest friends felt like enough of a public presence. Plus, it was less effort on my part, more likely to generate feedback, more likely to reach people I knew, and was more interactive. But my voice was curtailed. I was part of a community, but it wasn’t my own space.
I’m going to continue with Facebook, but I’m back on the blog as well. It just took me a few weeks to sort out this particular convergence. Compared to the e-mail/iPhone problem, I worked this one out relatively quickly.
And now I have about twenty unreturned e-mails on Facebook as well. Ah, convergence…