Micro

I forget that things like Twitter rolled out as "micro-blogging" services; that is, they were designed to truncate and capitalize on an existing practice. Blogs were already short and random and could be about literally anything, but those services built themselves on hyper-short versions. Over time it started to feel like those little blasts were all that the internet was good for, or all that it had ever been used for, and neither is true. 

It's hard to explain. It's like looking at Google Maps and switching from the standard map, full of color-coded traffic and names of places and sponsored placements for fast-food restaurants, to the satellite view, with its sea of trees and roads and even in the man-made structures a sense of the organic. The real view has a tactility, an appearance of something that has to be navigated by knowledge and time, instead of the digital construct, which is just an idea of what's there. The social networks and tweets and faves and rankings were the construct, and underneath is still the organic.