Navigating The Internet Slush Pile with Your Friends
A great article in the LA Times last week makes it clear that literacy isn’t dead – it’s simply evolving. Textbooks are coming alive on iPads; fans are interacting with authors, and extending fictional universes on sites like FanFiction.net; and authors are gaining notoriety through online publishing, proving themselves in the Wild West of the Internet prior to scoring a traditional print run. Now that anyone can be their own publisher, content is proliferating exponentially. (Yes, exponentially. I measured it last night with an astrolabe and a tape measure. As my daughter would say, “Trufax.”)
Between blogs, fan sites, and document libraries like Scribd, the Internet is a vast repository of textual content. Publishers refer to their collection of unsolicited submissions as the slush pile. The Internet is the world’s largest slush pile: there’s a wealth of information waiting to be tapped…if you know how to find it. This is where having friends comes in handy.
Before I read the Times article, I hadn’t used Scribd. “Great,” I thought, “another wasteland of content to navigate.” Fortunately, I have plenty of friends on Facebook, and Scribd supports Facebook integration. Everything my Facebook friends have uploaded to or read on Scribd is visible to me. That gives me a foothold into a service I would otherwise find unnavigable.
I hadn’t realized until I read this article how social media has changed the way I content-surf. Once upon a time, I would monitor hundreds of feeds in Google Reader – and i had the pinched shoulders to prove it. Now, I track less than 30. Most of these are high quality sites producing original content, such as NPR Music. Some are aggregators of quality articles, such as ArtsJournal. Everything else I read online comes from the recommendations of my online acquaintances. Instead of suffering under the delusion that I can monitor everything, I keep my eye on my infinitesimal slice of the Internet. And my friends keep their eyes on their slices. Whenever one of us finds something worthwhile, we shout “Eureka!” and fly it up the digital flagpole.
Combing through piles of crappy content to unearth a few gems is exhausting. But it’s manageable with a little help from my friends.
