I wasn’t happy with yesterday’s post, but I published anyway. I’m trying to be better about hitting the button because historically I have not done a good job of doing so. In fact, rather often, in the pursuit of the perfect post, I would edit myself right out of posting anything at all.
When I was writing that post about social media, my first thought was not about frequency of posts; I didn’t really think about whether that post would kickstart my writing habit again, but when I pressed the button that day, I felt relief. That sense of relief (at saying goodbye to “big social”) and accomplishment (as if publishing caused the last piece of a puzzle to fall into place) was enough to remind me how important (cathartic, perhaps) sharing ones thoughts can be.
Did the Internet community peak at bookmarks? Asked in a different and perhaps more complete way: just as technologies like RSS and email in their purest forms are hard to beat even as technology marches forward, what better technology exists to keep track of information on the ever-expanding Internet than bookmarks? Taken a step further, what better way to share the bookmarked information than a site of your own? As such, I‘ve been reading, which is why I write now.
Working in and having a passion for libraries, I am struck by the fact that the way bookmarks work in the physical world is not directly analogous to bookmarks in the digital world. Bookmarks in the digital world are instead like dog-eared pages or highlighted passages; if you think of the Internet as a single tome, that is. In any case, anything that moves you to deface a book should probably be shared or become immortalized in some other way than just a reference for a future version of yourself.