Input Output Problem
Once upon a grand time, my fellow tinkerers and I poured out thoughts that seeded the nets of social wonders. Our missives meant to signal that with our headlamps on, we were tunneling through the pipelines looking for a way out. Tapping messages to each other, searching for meaningful connections and testing throughput of the new com systems.
I remember the engineering chatter on Twitter (pre-fail-whale_) manually adding call instances when I would tweet about an earthquake. Now machines anticipate and spin up capacity. But I haven’t kept up.
We predicted that the silos were being fortified and lock-in was imminent. Some of us cornered founders at conferences and demanded open access. A few of us stopped feeding and cut ties when it became a classic business scheme- slurp the data, scrape the sentiment– market ointments for the itchy.
We warned each other that of course, we were the bait attracting the next wave of adopters. Mass would be achieved once pop celebs came a callin.’ Then some of us went inside. We made money championing the R.O.I. of trackable dialog. So far, so good. Except…
Get Michael Sean Wright’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
My output diminished. My circuits flooded with input and zapped my write functionality. I’m talking about feelings here. I can super-compute a brand message and land large-construct ideas into a shockingly wide swath of the populous with increasing frequency. What I’ve lost though is the ability to communicate the experience of my non-zero-plus-sum gains/losses.
We fragment on Facebook while Twitter gives us each a turn to tease ideals. But where do we put the full frame of who/why we are?
I’m more active with in-person events than ever before. But each one of these collectives are often focused on targeted issues like global poverty, equality, social justice, openness and identity. I’m grateful to be surrounded by so many powerful people in-action but I feel segmented.
So in an effort to defrag, I will get back to storytelling. Push beyond the fear and let it rip.
These are my words:
