I Am User Generated

In an Internet age with mass media saturation reaching epic proportions we as a society are inundated with information. The retention of this massive amount of information is a problem now as it was in an oral tradition. In an oral culture stories had to be remembered in ones own brain, there was not a textual form of archiving. In order to facilitate the memorization of stories, stories were aggregated but not analyzed. Continual analysis would confuse the stories making it more difficult to remember.Aggregation is one of the most notable evolutions of the second generation of the Internet. This aggregation really took off with AJAX technology. Where once a computer-user would wake up in the morning and open a separate url page for a national newspaper, a local newspaper, local weather, local sports team update, an online shop, it is now possible thru Real Simple Syndication (RSS) to have the exact same information and much more all housed on a single url page. Katherine Hayleswould see this as giving a piece of ourselves over to the computer an example of becoming Post-Human, but even with the endless archiving abilities of the Internet we still rely on the memory function housed in our brain just like our ancestors of the oral tradition. The AJAX RSS aggregation of sites like Netvibes or PopURLS help keep the story straight of information we want to receive and facilitate memory in order for us to tell the story over the water-cooler of last night’s game or the weather forecast. This technology helps our human memory but does not facilitate any analysis of this information. It may aggregate the syndicated feed of disparate stories onto the same webpage, but that is where the connection making ends. Daily stories are constantly being updated to these pages but never analyzed.