Has certainly changed the way I’ve lived my life for the past couple of months. Certainly, it’s been a while since I last used this outlet for my form of virtual expression.
But my new semester of school will begin in but a few more days, and I thought it appropriate to at least commit a few more thoughts to bits before said event; it almost certainly guarantees that my time available for such pursuits will be diminished significantly.
I’ve mostly managed to avoid the annoyance that is Facebook, even as most of my acquaintances mock me for doing so. Along with Skype. Or even Twitter, previously. My reasons for such choices vary widely from service to service, but every one of them involves a central issue at hand: effectiveness. To me, Facebook is wholly ineffective at communication; after a certain threshold, it ceases to be about communication and more about a social RSS reader. That’s perfectly fine; it’s just that I already use a combination of Google Reader and friends MSN-ing me stuff for that very purpose. It works fine.
And yet, now, I find myself on Twitter, on Google Plus, even on Facebook again for yet another brief instant when I was trying to organize a small gathering. And my phone has Skype installed in case of an emergency and I need to make a call out.
There’s no denying the staying potential of such services, of course. They’ll stick around just as much as the Apple phenomena has stuck around. It’s already affected me in several ways this summer, chaining me to my screens for hours in hope of receiving that next Twitter update from Katsuhiro Harada, or perhaps browsing through Reddit and trying to find more hilarious comments to amuse myself with.
Yes, it’s perhaps an evolution from my old IRC haunts and bulletin boards/forums that I used to waste my soul away on. And yet, somehow, these new services don’t feel as intimate, nor as functional. Skype’s over-bloated resource usage, Facebook, Twitter and Google+’s reliance on Jscript etc. are indeed major annoyances to me, but it seems that as much as I would have preferred otherwise, this is going to be the way of how HTML evolves, and while I would have hoped that it have been held off until our major software applications evolved to match thus, that’s how the world works.
But that is hardly a definitive reason for my inability to embrace such services wholly and entirely. Again, it’s about effectiveness. I use FARR instead of the Windows 7 start menu because for me, it’s faster, it’s more reliable, and it’s more effective. I use VSee instead of Skype because it’s faster, it’s more functional, and it’s more effective. I use foobar2k instead of something like WinAmp because it’s faster…see where I’m going with this?
And for something a little more unorthodox…I use 3D-Coat instead of Zbrush because of the same overall reasons, even if those reasons differ in how they are expressed technically.
So of course, this sounds entirely elitist, nerd-ish and completely irrelevant to the world. I suppose it’s safe to say that things like Final Cut X will eventually overtake people like me who prefer XSI to 3ds max or Maya, VS2010 to Xcode, and so on. But I don’t use applications because they’re convoluted and hard to figure out; if I did, I wouldn’t be using Modo, or mudbox, or hell, MyPaint for that matter. I use them because they’re the most efficient at what they do best.
“Use your tools,” I used to say. Somewhere along the line, I seem to have lost track of that vision. But at least I know what to do to get back on track. At least, after I spend a few more hours on TF2 and reddit…
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