I listened to Bruce Sterling talk at the end of SXSW interactive. (That was a very good talk. Sad and outraged and prophetic. Where’s the audio? But this is not about that.) He was talking for a moment about Mark Twain and how he reinvented himself so many times throughout his life and made a cranky aside about how the peculiarly American quality of reinvention is quashed by Facebook et al, where one is forever a prophet without honor, always the larval human someone else went to high school with. (Okay, I said that.) And that got me thinking about why Mark Twain’s reinventions seem so hard to comprehend and wondering about a question someone asked⁰¹ an hour before in a panel called Maps, Books, Spimes, and Paper, on the relative perceived credibility of different media, e.g. digital vs. paper. And then I started wondering about how print supersedes digital and why, and thinking it’s not just a matter of incumbency and the permanency and volume of the medium. It has to do with curation, with being chosen, of course. Being printed means/meant being chosen. How will the meaning of print change when everyone is self-published? What will the post publication method of curation be?

I’m also thinking about failure (Mark Twain had his share of business failure) and how, because Facebook facilitates a sort of necromancy with our long dead selves, it’s harder to live down failures. The normal process of living and living beyond those moments of failure should balance and renew us, but when others have shortcuts back to those discarded selves, we’re constantly forced to engage these inscrutable zombies that look like us from ten years ago, but whose judgment is opaque to us now. And all we want to do is fall on the abject fiend and dismember it before it devours us horribly, but it’s hemmed in by Facebook Friends backslapping and high fiving it and elbowing it gleefully in the ribs… Wow, that came out sounding a bit more terrifying than I intended. All I was trying say is that it’s nice to give people credit for growing up. Except people you went to high school with. You don’t have to give them credit. But if you don’t want to give them credit, don’t friend them, ferchrissake.