“Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file,” says Scott Rosenberg in a post looking at whether we can trust social networking sites with our history.

This is the real issue I have with Facebook: it’s going to go down, and it’s going to take your online life along with it. All things considered, the fundamental difference between Facebook and Twitter is that the data you throw onto Twitter can be pulled right back out of the service. (I’ve just started using Tweet Nest, which allows you to take on the responsibility for archiving your own tweets on your own server, and it’s fantastic). In a practical sense Twitter don’t own your tweets: they host them.

From an “I’m-only-interested-in-the-now” perspective, Facebook works just fine. You click on stuff that’s been uploaded over the past twenty-four hours, and Facebook gets a whole heap of ad revenue off each of those clicks. Fresh data = $$$.

But from a long-term perspective, Facebook is broken. Your data is trapped with a company that has little-to-no obligation to save your memories. Because old data is likely to generate fewer hits, Facebook has a very real incentive to delete all photographs or movies that hit a certain threshold: say, anything that hasn’t been viewed in the last twelve or eighteen months. Can you imagine the shitstorm if they implemented that policy today? But how about in ten years? Twenty? Why should Facebook give a damn about storing those prom photos you uploaded all the way back in 2006 that are getting two clicks a decade? Those photos might be important to you, but to Facebook, that’s just a dozen megabytes that aren’t generating squat by way of revenue. Then add on all the other data you’ve uploaded that you no longer look at (but might want to look at some day) and multiply that by a hundred million.

We didn’t kick up enough of a fuss when Geocities closed up shop. Now it’s up to non-profit groups like Internet Archive to trawl through the wreckage and salvage what they can. Yahoo, it should be noted, did not see any reason to keep their own active Geocities archive. The lesson to be learned – particularly as we transition to storing even more of our data in the cloud – is that the only person who really gives a damn your memories is you. You’re either fine with the fact that your data could disappear tomorrow, or you use services that let you put yourself in charge of your own virtual shoebox.

If you knew that all of your data would be gone within a decade, would that change the way you used Facebook?

When supermarket shopping, I’ve been drawn to the self checkout machine like a green-bag-toting-moth to a flame. Instead of waiting in line for the privilege of having my cereal blipped through the barcode scanner by a sullen and underpaid high school student, the self checkout gives me the power to skip faux-friendly “How do you do’s”, keep my headphones on, and place my groceries in bags in conformance to a very particular and, some might say, anal-retentive personal system (No, the milk cannot be in the same bag as the bread! Of course the carrots need to sit on top of the tomatoes!).

It all began with the disappearance of the corner deli. Shopping at chain stores, what we lost in terms of community, we gained back (and more!) in Red-Spot Specials. We profess our love for local independent greengrocers and bakeries, cafés and bookstores, because these places are friendly and warm and full of history, but when nobody’s looking (which is, frankly, most of the time), we’ll sneak off with our fresh-clipped coupons to foreign-owned franchises and save eight dollars fifty. I’m not immune. You’re not immune. We’re powerless before savings! (See Andy Ihnatko’s recent post on ‘Darwinist consumerism’).

Over the past year, two independent Rundle Street record stores have closed up shop: B Sharp and Big Star. As record-lovers are apt to do, friends and I have lamented the closures, agonised over what this might all mean for the future of local music culture. Why did nobody else care like we did? The truth is that we cared right up to the point where we felt like parting with our money. The last time most of us actually bought a record – or CD, or music DVD – was sometime back in 2006, just prior to signing up for an account on iTunes.

I begin to wonder what hope small retailers have in a world where it’s cheaper, faster, more convenient for me to purchase a title online for my Amazon Kindle (yes, I caved) than walk one block down the road to my local indie bookseller. Is there any way small retailers can appeal to our base instincts in order to ensure their very survival?

At the Moonlight Café in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, your commitment to local community scores you a free pastry. At the Good Life Grocery, the faithful are rewarded with a bonus apple. Recently, the community began experimenting with an ‘tagged money’ system called Bernal Bucks – you’d whack a ‘Bernal’ sticker on a $5 or $10 bill, and that note would become ‘supercharged’, gaining added value when circulated within the Bernal neighbourhood. Why spend a tagged ten bucks elsewhere, when, if you keep it moving through the Bernal economy, you can get a dollar off a beer or a free upgrade to a large coffee?

I ask Guillaume Lebleu, a Bernal resident who launched the initiative late last year, whether it might be possible to implement a similar system in a city the size of Adelaide. He tells me that what’s important is that Bernal is an “urban village where many people know each other, work together or play together” and in which there are a huge number of independent businesses and few, if any, national chains. He says the Bucks scheme is leading Bernal residents to develop an awareness of the importance of how money flows, and how the simple exchange of cash for goods is the strongest possible commitment any individual can make to the continued prosperity of a community.

I know that if I had a Bernal Buck  in hand, I’d be very, very reluctant to funnel it into the ravenous, heinous mouth of the supermarket self checkout. My guilt would get the better of me, and I’d be off, feeling warm and fuzzy in the recognition that my tangible support for my community will be rewarded just as tangibly with a free movie ticket, a cookie, or maybe a plum.

(This first appeared in the Sunday Mail, 22/8/2010)

Dave Egger’s Zeitoun sells for $10.85 in paperback (used from $8.95), and $11.99 as a Kindle edition. Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked sells for $10.12 in paperback and $11.99 Kindle. Amazon are competing with themselves – and losing. Every time Amazon publishes the Kindle price next to a lower paperback price, they’re loudly proclaiming, “Yeah, we fucked this.”

Now, how about selection? I can purchase Chris Cleave’s Little Bee in six different types of paperback, hardcover, and audio CD formats, but can’t get the book on Kindle. Because I live in Australia. Amazon can bypass copyright when they ship physical items, but they’re constrained when it comes to ebooks. And, of course, anything published on small-press is strictly off-limits for Kindle owners, because small-press don’t have the time to mess around with compiling and submitting ePub files.

Amazon aren’t fucking up, necessarily, but they better at least be aware that prospective Kindle buyers find the pricing and selection of Kindle editions a huge joke. I’d feel more comfortable if I knew that Amazon execs were worried about these issues – if there was some kind of commitment to, over the coming months, engage in discussions with publishers to bring the prices of Kindle editions down to more competitive levels. Even a basic commitment to price parity between Kindle ebooks and paperbacks would suffice.

But the Kindle has been around for several years, and not a lot has changed. Amazon are victims of their own success – too good at shipping paperbacks quickly, cheaply, and conveniently that most of us are left to wonder, “Who needs a Kindle?”

Say the Canadian government created a ‘Mini Montreal’ inside Cuba – there’s nothing forcing you, the Cuban, to move to this new city. But say this city becomes an economic and cultural centre… why wouldn’t you want to move there? If the charter city succeeds, the developing host nation benefits: development spreads rapidly out. If the charter city fails, economists head back to the drawing board.

Make sure to read down to the ‘skunkworks’ analogy. Genius.

When we broach the concept of obsolescence, what first comes to mind are fast-disappearing objects, faded relics of another age: mix tapes and vinyl records, quill pens and love letters, penny-farthings and Polaroid cameras. Obsolete objects, of course, never die: they’re turfed out of our houses as trash, only to turn up in antique stores, priced well and truly out of reach.

What we rarely consider is how many of our behaviours and ideas are rapidly becoming obsoleted.

When I was younger, family holidays were an exercise in misdirection. Freeway turnoffs were invariably missed, and my mother would use my father’s inability to read maps to make a point about his side’s patently inferior genetic makeup. I once got lost in a Westfield shopping town, another time in the stairwell of a sprawling London hotel. “You’ve got your father’s genes,” my mother would say, throwing me a look of utter disappointment. Even though I wasn’t training to become a cartographer or anything, it still stung.

It’s impossible to get lost now. Upon visiting a new city, we fire up our phones and hook straight into Google Maps. A friend told me she felt her dependence on technology had ruined her travel experience. Getting lost, she considered, was the entire point of travelling. Now she couldn’t get lost anywhere, no matter how hard she tried. (You say you could always turn off your phone, but who has the willpower?).

I think we’ve also lost the ability to be alone. Ten years ago, travel offered that opportunity – you’d nestle a chunky aeroplane novel at the top of your suitcase, and off you’d head: destination-bound, unreachable, incommunicado. “See you in a month,” you’d say. “I’ll send a postcard.” Today, the entire concept of ‘travel’ is fraught, because, wherever we go, a vuvuzela-buzz of endless chatter follows directly behind. In place of the aeroplane novel, we now have our phone or netbook or iPad – tools that bring endless streams of content along for the journey, everywhere the faintest trace of a WiFi signal becomes available.

It is no longer acceptable to go ‘off the grid’ for a fortnight. To not log into Facebook for a week comes across as intentionally antisocial: equivalent to flipping the bird at five hundred of your closest friends. When I didn’t check my personal email for just over twenty-four hours, I recently received an irate and expletive-laden message from a colleague, asking why I was intentionally ignoring his important correspondence. SMS messages generally require a response within the half-hour – any less and you’re branded criminally unreliable.

All this social babble is draining. We feel committed to spending more and more time cultivating our online personas, and staying on top of the stream of content produced by those around us. It’s no longer much fun. It feels like an obligation. And it’s made it difficult to step back for some quality one-on-one alone time with our thoughts.

It’s no longer acceptable to say, “I’d like to be alone for a while.” To want to step away from the babble for just a moment now seems vaguely sociopathic. Once it was that the librarian could place finger to pursed lips, hiss “Shh!”, and we’d all fall quiet. Now, when I look around the library’s reading room, half of us are staring at screens, frantically clicking ‘update’.

When was the last time you remember sitting still, and everything falling quiet?

Jason Fry, over at the The Nieman Journalism Lab, meanwhile, asks, “What if no publication can pull its discrete articles into a coherent whole?”

To be honest, I can’t understand how Rolling Stone manages to sell at all. On the one hand, the magazine seems to be heavily marketed toward 12 year-old pop music fans. Then, every so often, it tries to push for New Yorker territory with a complex investigative political piece like Michael Hastings’ ‘The Runaway General’. 12 year-old pop music fans don’t give a shit about foreign affairs. And those searching for quality long-form journalism aren’t going to subscribe to a magazine in which top billing is reserved for Twilight and Lady Gaga fluff. Rolling Stone has no ideal reader.

This just makes me even more sure that what makes great magazines great is a winning, coherent personality. Great content isn’t enough.

“First you’re going to need your main ingredient: the Point. Take the Point and blend it as finely as you dare, really, the finer the better. Then you’re going to take some Fluff — as a general guideline, you’ll want 6 parts Fluff to 1 part Point — and mix until the Point is barely perceptible.” nostrich, on moron bloggers.

“Perhaps instead long lasting can now be measured not only in years, but in minds—not in how long an object persists, but in how many people it changes.” Mandy Brown, on permanence in the blogosphere.

“Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” Snarkmarket’s Robin Sloan on ‘stock and flow’.

When former Gawker writer Emily Gould scored the cover story of the Times Magazine in May 2008, people got pissy. Then-26-year-old Gould’s piece ran to just under 8000 words, and was a memoir of sorts, detailing her exploits as a personal and professional blogger. The piece received over a thousand online comments, most of them outrageously negative. One of them, by ‘bill of cambridge’, read in part, “it all seems so remarkably self-indulgent and yet so completely trivial, no offense. really, the details of your life are no more interesting than those of anyone else’s. they are of interest only to you and those who care about you.”

Wanting to tell your story is a tricky business. You leave yourself open to charges of selfishness and egotism: after all, what makes you think we’d want to read about you? One way to counter that might to say, “Well, actually, I’m not writing about myself. I’m writing as a [Jew/orphan/prostitute/blogger/insert-exotic-identity-group-here].” But then, of course, you find yourself screwed again, because what right do you have to act as the spokesperson for whatever social group you happen to be a part of? What right did Gould have, for example, to write on behalf of bloggers everywhere?

Clearly, writing a great memoir is a hard ask. You need to make sure your work can’t and won’t be construed as an exercise in narcissism, and you need to situate yourself as speaking as a member of some social group, without placing yourself on a pedestal as speaking for that group. God, you end up thinking, this is too tricky. Might as well stop writing now.

Benjamin Law is second-generation Asian-Australian, funny, and gay. His collection of personal essays, recently published as The Family Law, is a precarious balancing act. Law is self-deprecating (as a kid, little Benjamin pees the bed after watching Stephen King’s It; later, he anxiously wonders whether all teenagers enjoy Mariah Carey’s Music Box as much as he does), saving him from charges of arrogance. And he manages to situate himself as a young, gay, second-generation Asian-Australian, without coming off as the ‘official spokesperson’ for every young, gay, second-generation Asian-Australian out there.

In the twenty-plus pieces that comprise The Family Law, Law never drags us along under the promise that his life experiences contain profound truths. Law writes to entertain. My first LOL-out-loud moment came on page 5, imagining Minnie Mouse running out of the Disneyland castle, hands on cheeks, screaming, “I was raaaaped!” I tried to count the references to dicks and vah-jarn-ahs, but gave up after page 10.

Still, like all great humorists, Law’s talent is that his seemingly throwaway quips more often than not cloak penetrating truths. It would take me way too many words to explain how Law manages to turn a story about his mother learning the word ‘cunt’ into a sincere, heartfelt examination of shifting cultural identity. But do you really want to read a ‘sincere, heartfelt examination of shifting cultural identity’, or do you want to read a bunch of fifth-graderish jokes about veejays and peens? That’s what makes Benjamin a bit of a genius: he bundles one with the other. And not once does it seem trivial. Not even the monstrously oversized, winking paper labia.