Back in the good old days, when you were reading a blog – it would often link to one or more other blogs that made a good point or had published a good article. You could click over to that new blog and check it out. If you liked what you’d just discovered, and you weren’t scared of orange icons, you could subscribe to receive every new article that new blog ever published in an inbox called an RSS reader. It was like magic – your universe could be explode with new people and sources of information.
Google Currents doesn’t let you do that. If you’ve got a Google Reader account from the hard old days you can add one subscription at a time to Currents, but if you discover something new out on the web at large – clicking the RSS icon does nothing. It’s like an empty smile – not a portal into a world of potential learning and fun – just a dead link. It’s a violation of an important universal law to kill an RSS link, but that’s what Google Currents has done. Those feeds, promises of new relationships easily entered into so easily, were awfully messy anyway weren’t they? Surely you’d prefer one of the hand selected recommended feeds back in the safe confines of the Currents interface.
Above: The horrible face of raw information. Hide the children, something must be done if this is every going to catch on.
Those untamed pioneers who subscribed to RSS feeds in a feed reader (and shaved their face with a wagon wheel) sometimes swam in what was called a river of news. A River of News is a beautiful thing. Let’s say you were reading the fabulous group blog on humanities Crooked Timber (one of my early favorite blogs and still going strong!) and you looked at the sidebar of the page. There you’d find what was called a Blogroll, where bloggers would like freely to other blogs that they liked. There is no place for such frivolity in Google Currents, of course, you will read the stripped down primary content and nothing else.
You might click on a link in the blogroll, heck you might click on every link in the blogroll, and you might find one, two or twenty other humanities blogs you found inspiring. Then you’d click on the orange RSS icon (not anymore! not in Currents!) and you would enter a sacred but lightweight pact to have delivered to you every article that those blogs published in the future. You wouldn’t have to visit their pages and see if they published anything new – you’d just open up your feed reader (a messy, noisy, unpretty thing) and be exposed to The River of News. The newest posts from every blog you’d ever subscribed to, all in a stream, in the order they were published in, with the very freshest article at the top.
You cannot do that in Google Currents.
Maybe in your feed reader you’d put all those Humanities blogs in a folder titled “Humanities.” Maybe you’d click around and discover other blogs about Finance, Argentina, old movies, new movies, fast cars, loud-talking women – whatever the case was, one blog would link to another blog and another and you could, with a click, fill up your universe with birds of many feathers.
Then you could open up your feed reader and say “Universe! Show me the latest deep thoughts from the world of Finance! From my favorite sources on Argentina! From 5 loud-talking women I’ve never met but have grown to love because I never fail to receive their latest blog posts inside my precious feed reader!”
Maybe that day you’d meet a new one and you’d subscribe.
Then one day you’d read an article inside a feed that made you want to post a comment. You’d click through to the web page and you’d pour out your thoughts and feelings. And you’d read the considered perspectives of other people from all around the world who posted comments.
Not in Google Currents you don’t. At least when reading the approved sources (called “Editions”) you cannot click through to the websites the articles have come from. You cannot read comments, you cannot post comments, you can only swipe fruitlessly at your iPad wishing you could find a place to engage in the community that is a blog but instead finding that another discussion-free article from the same source has slid into your field of vision. You might feel disoriented, you might feel alone, you might feel like someone who grew up in a broadcast media world who once was no longer rendered silent and alone but now who is so again. You might cry a little, or start to scream for help. (I wouldn’t blame you.)
You might try to bookmark an article with Delicious, but you cannot – there is only Pinboard. You might see the section titled “User Generated” and run there with high hopes – but you’ll find that it’s just a bunch of professionally produced video content posted to a site cynically named “You Tube.”
Back in the old days, all that clicking around, free subscribing, commenting and reading comments – that was the stuff that gave new little blogs a reason to live. You could have ten readers and if they posted comments and new people came around sometimes and sometimes stayed – that is like the breath of life for new bloggers. Take that away from them and just put the best big blogs in a pretty box and what have you got? The death of blogging is what you’ve got. You’ve got some bloggers like me today who will have thousands of silent readers enjoying this blog on their iPads – but you won’t have as many bloggers like me 7 years ago, finding my first small communities online in the network of independent blogs and their comments. That means fewer voices, less diversity, less discourse and democracy, less vigorous debate, less defense of and dignity for the formerly voiceless.
It’s not all bad, of course. When you look at a trending topic there is an “About” tab, offering up expository content about current events. It’s a much friendlier way to read content than RSS readers, which for some sad reason scared away most of the world.
I’ve got some respect for Justin Bieber – I watched his movie in 3D and learned that he’s a seriously talented musician. When someone dulls their capabilities in order to reach a larger audience, though, you have to wonder what that means for the message that could have been communicated by full-throated exploration of what’s really possible.
It is awfully clean looking though, isn’t it?
Two Twitter accounts associated with Anonymous have claimed responsibility for a denial of service attack on the 
Google Currents is