Signal to Noise

During the eighties and early nineties, it was common to see public service announcements decrying the startling rate of illiteracy in the United States.  That is, the incidence of people who could not read.  Adults who could not read accounted for fully half of the unemployment rate at one point during my childhood. Incidentally, true illiteracy was, and is, a real problem–one that never returned to the lime light when the dot com bubble burst.

Today, the concern over “digital illiteracy” seems to be formulated with the same sense of alarmism that ought rightly be place on deep systemic problems like illiteracy and even drug addiction.  The argument is, how are people going to succeed in the “digital world” unless they’re armed with a digital skill set?  And to some extent, I agree.

But in true “where’s the outrage” form, I’ve got to chuckle at the Wall Street Journal’s rush to conclusion that the digital exuberance is the ultimate answer to questions of equality and opportunity. It’s truly laughable that so many people are upset over whether or not failing segments of society have access to broadband. Would broadband somehow make these groups of people more successful, or any more apt to flourish than those of us who already use 40 megabit pipes?

I doubt it.  The problem is, we have a poor system of establishing a desire to be self-reliant.  People aren’t necessarily born with the essential values of earning in mind. Take a look at the failure rate of Cleveland high school students if you disagree. In a world where every novelty is available cheaply due to Chinese workers who actually believe in the hallowed concept of value creation, American degenerates are able to coast along sucking at the nipple of mediocrity.

Let’s work on true literacy before we work on digital literacy.  We can play video games until we’re blue in the face and still have no idea how to make change at a cash register.

So people have been calling for widespread abandonment of RSS, a simple, dominant update publishing technology developed as a way of syndicating content between web sites, servers, and browsers.  Some reputable people have even gone so far as to call RSS a web “1.0″ technology, which is a masked form of irrational exuberance over the phenomenon known as Twitter.

Mike Arrogantington has comented that RSS is “definitely dead” because Feedburner’s CEO is going to Twitter.  Perhaps this has less to do with the health of RSS and more to do with the fact that Feedburner just isn’t fashionable any more, while Twitter is considered sexy and curvy.  Sam Diaz, too, is going to get a nice paycheck.  Hey, if Twitter was throwing money at me, I’d probably say RSS was dead, too.

Yet Twitter’s greatest promise remains not as the solution for those seeking a chat application, a social networking tool, an authentication scheme, and certainly not as a content syndication standard, but rather as a platform for accomplishing all of the above.  My point is this:  RSS is for more than just update pinging (which is basically ALL Twitter brings to the table for a content publisher).

RSS also accomplishes the following:

1. RSS generally enforces accurate datelines. (Twitter is subject to whenever the tweet occured.)
2. RSS offers a basis in XML, making it an extensible transport for specialized content payloads. (Twitter relies on third-party interop for such, like Twitpic, say.)
3. RSS offers a more than 140 character limit per post.  (Twitter — well, this one should be self-explanatory.)
4. RSS has no features which increase the need for spam control techniques.  (Twitter — spend your days blocking followers who want to lead you back to porn sites and borrow your credit card number.)
5. With RSS, real syndication with content duplication is possible and there are many situations where this is necessary and beneficial. (With Twitter, you’re always parsing a linkback in order to find and syndicate content.)
6. RSS is an open, community-based standard that solves a well-defined problem. (Twitter is a private concern with no apparent motive other than audience building.)
7. RSS can be used on any server in the world capable of answering a get request. (Twitter only runs on Twitter’s servers.)
8. RSS doesn’t intrinsically encourage the posting of the silly, arbitrary, private details of one’s life; ie. it’s a publishing platform. (Twitter is a social platform.)
9. RSS is entirely anonymous. (Twitter client requests are identity-based.)
10. RSS is compatible with any authentication scheme the publisher desires.  (Twitter only authenticates Twitter users.)