musings

i’m breaking my own rules with this post. my namesake once said, “Never complain, never explain”. good words, yet not words for today.

i’ve been blogging since 2003. it was a medium i easily fell into, as i could express myself on a public forum through words. i loved blogging. i was able to merge my web design hobby with my writing hobby. i could flesh out what i was thinking and being taught in my life on a website and in turn, my friends could respond.

then it got cool. (bud, you called it). everyone started blogging – news sites, churches, corporations, but unfortunately, not dave barry. i kept waiting for him to blog his column (which eventually happened). rss feeds were all the rave, and so easy to access. i didn’t have to go to every individual page to see if it had been updated because google reader happened. all of that information in one place, and it was glorious.

next came facebook. i really didn’t think it would catch on the way it has. i figured it’s popularity would be much more short–lived, like myspace. you could reconnect with people you haven’t seen in ten years. “oh, what happened to my childhood friend? he’s a race car driver in virginia now.”

yet we’re trespassing on information we were never really meant to know and becoming narcissists in the meantime. forty years ago without these technological aids, we would have just had to wonder. knowing kills the fantasy, and fantasy is an important ingredient in life. to know who your childhood friend became or that your favorite elementary school teacher isn’t as cool as you once thought – it kills the illusions of childhood.

we know too much, and what we don’t know is often only a few characters worth of typing away.

twitter followed and has continued to perpetuate this further. here are a few sample twitters from my current feed:

• is posting from the iphone
• getting a fabulous haircut!
• yoga, class, collapse.
• hmm. work. hmm.
• Just rediscovered Dr. Pepper, the one non-diet drink I really like. The office fridge is packed with them today. (We have free sodas.)

honestly, i don’t care that cameron strang has free sodas at relevant. that’s nice for him, yet knowing it does not enhance my life in any foreseeable way. nor do the other mentioned posts (note: from my own twitter feed) enrich the lives of others. that’s ten seconds of my life or other peoples lives that we can’t get back. now add up all of the time spent on useless information in a single day… in a month… in a year. mass accumulation.

now this is where it gets sticky. it’s not cameron strang’s fault or the fault of anyone else. it’s my own fault. i followed his blog, twitter, facebook, cetera.

one year ago, i changed my life. i bought a one-way ticket to hawai’i. i quit my job. i moved my life without any tangible plan for the future. i also stopped blogging. why?

because i haven’t had anything to say.

at some point, we have to live our lives without mediation. we need to stop being social hermits that communicate with the people we care about more through facebook than in person. this is not to say that technology or more specifically, social media, is a negative entity. it is a powerful entity whose power should be harnessed to enrich our lives, not dictate them. i, for one, allow the “DING!” from gmail notifier to pull me from my current activities or allow my iphone to command my attention when i should be holding hands with the handsome fellow sitting across from me far too often.

for me, it’s a two-fold issue. i stopped blogging because i didn’t have anything meaningful to say, yet kept reading (and being overwhelmed) by the incoming amounts of information. you have to make choices about what information bears importance. otherwise, it all just becomes detrimental noise.

my friend eric and i have recently discussed how we are educating ourselves into an inability to truly communicate. eric’s fear is that if he twitters – which to this date, he does not – he will cultivate his writing habits in a way that will be detrimental to his writing abilities, something which i have experienced. by only reading blogs and writing in 140 characters or less, we diminish our attention spans and ability to write meaningfully.

i still have myspace, facebook, twitter, and google reader accounts, yet going forward, i plan to use much more meaningfully. what that means? thoughts for another post. this current one is already far too long.

last thought – for those who say they don’t blog because of twitter? malarky! if that’s the case, you never really had anything to say.

the title of this post is credited to robert brodrecht.