Matt Langer

giantrobotlasers:

I’m about to hit the hay, but just had a thought.

There are more people actively playing Farmville on Facebook than are on Twitter.

That blows my mind, for a few reasons. The $1B valuation / uber hype around twitter is one part of it. But coming from the other direction, that so many people would try out something so frivolous and un-fun as farmville is really quite amazing.

I get the same emotions when I look at trending topics on twitter. People get really excited about them. I think they are pop tripe. On the face of it, Twitter made a huge error highlighting them so much. The trending topics are doomed to be uninteresting to most people. Take a recent, sad example like #lightskin.

But I know I’m wrong. Most people want to see what most people appear to want to see. That thought is such a downer for me.

It’s so disorienting to think back to the early days of the web—all that halcyon enthusiasm, the talk of connectedness and open access and all those high hopes for an “information revolution”—and to compare it to what we see today: Twitter’s trending topics, YouTube comment threads, Facebook games. What is most popular on the web today is usually indistinguishable from the valueless; the promise of an enlightened Web has devolved into a series of continuing distractions—and trite ones at that.

A digression, but a related one: the very first thing Steve Wozniak did after writing the Basic was to program a game.

I’m as susceptible as Ivan is to lament this erosion, and yet what I find curious is that I don’t similarly lament the sorry state of popularly acclaimed cinema or music or literature or the like. And I suspect this has much to do with the age of the web. Consider the following, which my dear friend J.C. whipped up a while back during a discussion of the Web’s comparative youth:

The older media have developed consistent distribution channels and predictable schedules and noteworthy critics and a whole host of ancillary properties that allow their production to be properly churned and categorized and consumed. Take the literary industry as an example: the consumer of the London Review is very different from that of the New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book Review or the bestseller list or the sprawling discount table at the local Barnes & Noble, and yet each of these consumers is able to make sense of an industry that annually pumps out 1.2 million new titles. And let us not forget the importance of shared cultural memory—I do not need Michiko Kakutani to tell me that Don Quixote is a worthwhile read.

It is precisely because the Web is so lacking on all of these fronts that its trivialities seem so overwhelming. As of yet the Web has no shared cultural memory (searchable archives does not a memory make), and its distribution channels are still so volatile that filtering this content in any meaningful way remains an unsolved problem.

Yet there is real value out there—every so often you chance upon it. The challenge is to construct those tools and standards and traditions that will allow for an effecient taxonomy and for a discovery of value on the Web that can happen on demand and not simply by accident.