Moving Toward A Techno-Sustainable Lifestyle
By Gregory Heller on 09/10/2012 - 13:05
When I first came to Web Of Change in 2005, I had never uploaded a video to YouTube. You probably hadn't either. YouTube did not officially launch its service until November of 2005. Flickr launched 18 months earlier, and was acquired by Yahoo! in March of 2005. I started uploading photos in April of 2005. Twitter wasn't publicly available until July of 2006, though it didn't start to take off until SXSW Interactive in 2007. Facebook did not open to the general public until September 2006, around the second time I attended WOC, but I barely remember it coming up in conversation.
In the year since we've seen the launches of Vimeo, Tumblr, Pinterest, Identica, Diaspora, services that work on top of these for measurement, metric, sharing and evaluation, and countless others some of which are not longer with us, and others that are just now on the ascent. Doubtless there will be untold other online services, or social media sites, that will be launched in the months and years ahead.
During the session, "Tools You Can Use," facilitated by Drew Bernard and Jake Brewer, we came up with a list of no less than 40 applications or services that people "could not live without." Surely there are others that we missed.
As technologists (on either end of the client/vendor relationship) we must stay on top of the latest and greatest technologies and evaluate them for our clients and colleagues, but as individual -- outside of our work -- how do we balance the need to experiment with these tools with the lives we want to live?
Is it possible to both live an intentional life, one that balances our priorities, and explore every new communication tool made available on the internet? Is it even necessary? Are we approaching a point at which there are too many new tools that interact in too many different ways for any one person to fully understand the utility and impact of each individually and in concert?
During Web Of Change, we spent time with some of the most wired, and savvy people in our industry, and we were -- largely -- offline, disconnected from these services, and connected with each other sharing a time, space and context. It is a luxury that we rarely afford ourselves. As we reintegrate with the wired world, can we bring some of the spaciousness found at Hollyhock back into our lives, and think about strategies of techno-sustainability?
I'd invite you to share your thoughts and strategies in the day's and weeks ahead. The Sabbath Manifesto might be an interesting jumping off point for some of us. I am sure there are other resources as well.
“I’m leaving Web of Change inspired in a way that just doesn’t happen at other conferences. I’ve laughed so much in the last five days and it’s bringing joy and energy back into my work.”
