Remembering RSS and linking
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 by Ken Smith

I was talking with my first-year students about Hossein Derakhshan's important essay on the not-so-slow destruction of the open web. I'd guess the average age of the students was 19, and they had no direct experience of the link-rich, user-organized public space we shared widely just a few years ago. They did not easily see how far the decay has gone because they have never used an RSS reader to keep up with a few dozen active sites that matter to them. They have never written a posting where it might matter that you can include several links, not just the paltry one allotted us by Facebook, say. Based on what they bring to the discussion, they tended to respond to Derakhshan with, essentially, "What's the big deal?"

On the one hand, nostalgia is a dangerous guide. On the other hand, if you haven't lived long enough to know when things were better, you're an unreliable judge. There is a wonderful poem by Seamus Heaney in The Spirit Level about the first spring after World War Two and the utter relief of it, and elders realizing that the young ones now being born will never feel that renewal the way the people who lived through the war do. Never. Our elders have some things that their offspring don't have. (See "After Liberation" in the Heaney book--the Amazon preview will show it on pages 6-7.)

Usually we imagine that the young will do the fighting for progress that needs to be done, but if they struggle, as in the case of the open web, even to imagine what's been lost, then they're not likely to lead the fight. The elders must still lead.

Meanwhile, I've got the new River5 RSS reader running on two machines, feeding and refreshing national and international headlines and links every few minutes all day long. And I still remember.