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RSSless youth culture?

Apophenia thinks that syndication and youth culture aren’t so compatible, and that RSS is more for the infogeeks while youth culture seems to flock more to things like LiveJournal.

What gets me about syndication is not my personal neuroses around it (although i fear that others will be pushed over the edge with the continuous increase in feeds). What gets me about syndication is that i can’t resolve the proposed models with the usage patterns i see in youth culture.

I don’t know, there may be something to this, but I also think some hybrid might evolve. When I was living in Canada, most people I knew just barely understood who to get webmail accounts working. But when I arrived in Korea, everyone I knew had a webmail.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t know many Koreans who use RSS aggregators, but I do know that the daum cafe model (which is kind of a weird cross between LJ and yahoogroups) are still vastly popular, though cyworld—which is kind of a cross between LJ and blogging, I guess, from the little I know—is on the rise.

The thing is, I’m certain all of this stuff, which is a mainstay of youth internet culture, would have looked absolutely geeky ten years ago. Youth culture’s perception of what is too geeky changes, and given that now everyone I know has an email address, I think the old 80s “computer geek” has found a little roosting space in everyone’s mind. Probably, though, some kind of user-nonintensive hybrid will evolve, where, using presets, you can set your “feeds” (friends?) to drop off new posts after a given time, where you will get anything mentioning you brought to the forefront, and where you don’t have to fiddle with buttons and knobs and such. Hell, even I—as webgeeky as anyone I know—would like a couple of presets like that for various folders on my blogroll.

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