digital conservatives
On the interwebs, everyone seems to make fun or ridicule conservatives. Not that I find that a bad thing most of the time. For example:
Conservatives: We want to control and censor the Internet!
Us: These idiots don't understand the web, change/new is good!
Conservatives: We don't think gay people should be allowed to get married!
Us: These idiots are afraid of things being different.
And so on.
But the second something in our holy internet world changes, we become conservatives right away. Whining and bitching about something to change like our lives would depend on it.
Most recent example: Twitter
It seems Twitter found a way to move on. To monetize their platform and to make it more appealing to the general public. They release a new version of their iPhone app, and refresh the Web site, and again we idiots start crying like babies. We start to yell at them, because we don't think DMs are as accessible as we want them to be, we whine because we don't see a need for a "Discover" tab. As before with #fixreplies we moan about the change and want things to be the old way (yes I moaned too). And of course, the user interface of the app is different. How dare they?!
For fucks sake, wake up. Change happens! We are changing the world every day and require others to embrace the change we come up with, but are unable to cope with DMs moving to another spot or the fact that Twitter tries to focus more on stories?
Face it: Twitter offered us a great service for years, free of charge without a business model, but still paying their people, servers and bandwidth. Now with "Discover" they might have found a way to inject sponsored messages into your Twitter experience. So what? TV does it. Youtube does it. And your favorite blog probably does it as well. Why for heavens sake is Twitter not allowed to change and start to generate revenue?
Take a closer look at "Discover" for a while. I already found bits of interesting stuff and new interesting people to follow. Now think about people new to Twitter, suddenly they have easier access to trending/popular topics.
For me, Twitter always was about getting information and comunicating with people, and while the communication part didn't change, getting information just got easier.
Oh and in case you are just whining about the new look, functions or whatever of the new Twitter iPhone app, there are tons of developers standing there with open arms, ready to welcome you to a world of a Twitter client that might just do exactly what you want.
So please stop whining, stop being conservative and live the future (also in technology), because the future begins. Right. Now.
