Filling the static and silence
Loneliness can be overwhelming to the extent of despair. It’s practically an innate need of living things to connect with something or someone that acts not only as a mirror to our subjective experience, but also as validation that our subjective experience is not singular. No matter how desperately we want to believe, at times, that our struggles are ours alone—someone somewhere can, at the very least, relate on some minute level.
I was not a particularly social child growing up. I had no patience for childlike activities or conversations, so it went without saying that discussions with adults were far more enjoyable. The trouble with this, however, lay in the fact that I could never take these discourses home with me or to the playground or the cafeteria or anywhere else where I was supposed to act like a kid among other four-footers. Needless to say, my friends were oft books and chatter limited itself to whatever the singer of the song on the record/radio/cassette tape had to say. That I read Moby Dick over the course of a week in sixth grade might speak more about my isolation than anything else.
My stereo and later the iPod eventually filled the static and silence in later years. There was nothing so holy as hearing someone talk about your life without having ever met you, but telling the story so much more eloquently than you ever believed yourself able. (This remains the case—music connects us to emotions and experiences that are both real and fantasized. Why else would Presidential candidates have pep rally playlists?) Nirvana, Placebo, and The Manic Street Preachers crashed through my version of the 90s and Steppenwolf was my turntable favorite, among others.
Either way, these things took me away from the bubble that I felt I occupied.
Where we previously had books (David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Joan Didion) and our favorite bands, the internet and social media cropped up. In a way, the threads that tie us together via social media take what books and bands do and add steroids. Eloquence is one thing, to have an actual conversation with someone that gets it is something else. While you know some vague detail about the people with whom you trade favorite authors or show up at the same shows, the internet affords some speck of anonymity (if desired) when it comes to the gritty, bare bones discussions. You can bare your soul without necessarily having to readily admit it to someone that knows you face to face.
I remember discovering forums and message boards a good ten or fifteen years ago and what a find. You had a handle, you had an avatar, and you could share your secrets without having to share “who” you were. (Of course, now there’s Post Secret, which trumps all of this!) Somehow, even if you felt lonely in your daily life, you could turn on the machine (listen to the bloody modem for those that remember dial-up), and there was suddenly a whole world full of people that “got it.”
People ask now, “Why mess with social media? It seems kind of self-indulgent and a giant waste of time.” I say, why not? It would be like asking, “What’s the point of travelling to other places?” or “Why read the news or magazines?” We are a product of need for other living beings (including plants and animals and whatever else serves as your companion.) Even if one doesn’t particularly like the company of others and prefers a solitary existence (yes, that includes me, the perpetual roommate-free single dweller), we still have a sometimes begrudging need for validation of our existence, of our experience from/by something/someone else.
Even if it’s only a mirror. Figurative or not.
The internet isn’t your pony such that you can support free speech and expect it not to have political consequences.
Time is the new currency
Don’t tell me what you do—show me.
We have short attention spans these days. Anyone selling anything—ideas, services, shitty poetry, whatever—should be less concerned with the money being acquired and more concerned with whether or not the audience/users/clients will want to invest more than 30 seconds in what’s being offered.
Time is more valuable than anything else these days—especially since technology has allowed us to do more in less time.
If you’re planning on killing your career or your product—whatever it is—do the following: list out what you can do or tease me with a vague description of what you offer. Boring.
Instead, give us your 30-second schpeel in video or photograph form. Visually walk me through the highlighted features—perhaps showing what you can do that other don’t or won’t do. I don’t care if you don’t know a lot of name-dropping worthy people or that you’re doing everything out of your own pocket. I want to know why I should give you my time and energy instead of giving it to someone else.
And if you’re trying to conquer the world with a wide breadth of offerings (e.g. Google), you’d better spend some of your time making your current products more robust. It’s spectacular that you have the brain power and talent pool to crank out innovation like no tomorrow, but if you aren’t doing anything to make what you have now BETTER I’m going to start shopping around for other service providers.
Time is the real currency of the post-modern world. If no one is willing to give you a little bit of theirs, you will never go anywhere.
Information and Access to It = Power
The last few months, the global community has watched as political culture and the law have dramatically attempted to play catchup with technology and its place in our individual lives on both a day-to-day basis, as well as in the lives we share as a world collective.
Information has always equaled power, but we now live in a time where the Internet has allowed for the passage of knowledge beyond cultural and geographical borders at a speed completely unheard of in the past. With the recent Internet blackout by Egypt’s government, it is becoming more and more obvious that those who have access to information—not matter what it may be—hold the power. Discussions of the digital divide stretch back as far as Marshall McLuhan, but perhaps it is only now that we are seeing the fruits of that dialogue.
Who owns information? Who should have the ability to essentially turn it on or turn it off? How are personal freedoms and safety affected? How about the freedoms and safety of nations, as whole entities?
There are no easy answers to these questions. We live in a world that has gradually become more dependent on the internet and the freedom that it provides. Depriving one’s people of said freedom is essentially oppressing them. It may not be a physical genocide, but what Egypt is doing will cripple their population if it continues for any tremendous length of time. One can see the effects of technology-blindness right here in U.S., as so many people are discovering how unemployable they have become without even basic computer skills.
I’m not here to debate whether private information should be shared with the public. Thousands upon thousands of people do it every day on Facebook voluntarily and ultimately, at the end of the day, that argument is better suited as case by case. The matter at hand is the access to it or any flavor of information, in general. If the internet has become one of our primary threads to the many communities and many people outside of our personal bubbles, is it right to cut off that primary life line? I think not and that’s exactly what Egypt is doing. Whether a global blanket of internet access were to exist or international laws in terms of information accessed and distributed via the online world put in place, solutions are complicated.
Only time will allow for the evolution of this situation and hopefully it involves Egypt getting back online.
