Life, in Real Time!
Mashable’s Pete Cashmore writes here about the real-time web, where increasing amounts of information are available to us the moment they are created.
Writing about how people can now review their experiences in real time:
Why wait till you get home to review that cafe or restaurant when you’ve got Yelp and Urbanspoon on your iPhone? Movie was awful, you say? Try Flixster.
Is it possible that this need to give real-time feedback is changing the way we actually experience things? I think so. I can’t count how many times in the past year I’ve been in the middle of a conversation, meeting, movie, or event and thought, “I should Tweet about this.”
I have to admit, too, that I’m probably using how “Tweet-worthy” something is as a measurement tool. “Is this interesting enough to tweet?” “Is the scenery around me worth taking and posting a picture to Facebook?”
Perhaps we’re losing our ability to simply experience the world around us. Or perhaps we’re redefining what it means to have a full and complete experience. Perhaps an experience unable to be shared publicly won’t feel like a real experience for much longer.
