Zach makes an important point about the evolution of personal publishing on the web:
It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me, rather it’s the trend of emphasizing a user’s popularity on the network. Lamentably, I think this metric will come to define the experience for the next generation of social networks. I fear that the internet’s utility for many people will equate to constant awareness of one’s value, and the play of meaningless games to increase the sum.
I worry, too, about placing too much emphasis on this immediacy of approval and popular appeal, and the long-term effects of conditioning a generation of internet users to such a metric of success. Production is at risk of becoming a formulaic activity, where popular acclaim is guaranteed for anyone who plays by the established rules, hits all the right notes and makes the proper inside jokes. At the same time, such formulaic production will be both validated and perpetuated by immediate positive reinforcement.
Creativity and timelessness will be the first casualties of a web that continues in this direction, a web whose most notable creations will have the aesthetic of cheap memes and the lasting value of a 4chan board.
Late in his career Herman Melville was met with marginal-at-best popular acclaim, and yet he wrote Moby Dick anyway. I wonder if the same thing could happen today.
