Retread

How many times have you seen that same link about the iPad? Or about the latest cute box loving kitten youtube?

Within your Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg and any other popular social networks and news aggregators you will see the same link over and over again. In Twitter about 80% of the tweets are ReTweets from another user, like a hot potato it gets passed on and on until it gets stale. After a while you've seen it enough to recite it in your sleep or under a hot lamp in an interrogation.

"I put it up first! Please credit me!"

Yeah, you did simultaneously with a few hundred > thousand other people. Once an article goes up on the web, it is feed automatically to all its outbound links and feeds. I see the pleas to attach the name of the person who posted the link if you repost it, attributing a link is like a badge with this "I found this" stitched on it. So what is "fresh news"? Even the moment an earthquake hits California, it is tweeted within seconds across the networks. We are on the edge of knowing before it happens, while in the days of print, news took a day to get to your doorstep or news station, it now bypasses and hits your screen in a bouncing alert icon.

"I already saw that."

It has come to the point where I don't bother to post links, because I can already see that my network has done the job for me. I just sit back and get spoon fed the news. The one difference between searching for it on my own and watching my feeds, is that my group is made up of a certain type, political, geographical, sexual preferences, visual, and is narrow enough to be a small focus on the world. But to see what is really happening outside this frame, I have to finally set out on my own and feed myself.

What matters is what you find interesting, not what you think everyone else will.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Serenity by the Sea