From my brain to yours

Posted on 7th May 2011 in Something Daily

If you were to ask why I haven’t written in a few days, there are a lot of possible answers that I could give you. Most of them are true, except for the one where I tell you that I didn’t write because I was held captive by samurai – that one’s not true….yet. Among the more “real” responses to that question are “because I was moving from my dorm to an apartment”, “because I was completely caught up in trying to learn buffer overflows and wouldn’t rest until I could get one to work”, “because I felt that I had nothing to write about” and “because I was taking finals and writing final papers”.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about how I want this blog to go. I seem to be leaning in the direction of making it much more tech-oriented, despite the fact that certain sectors of my psyche get very angry with that idea. I’m not worried about those sectors, though, so I plan to start doing a lot more tutorials and writing about technology in general. It’s something I think I can do well at. For close to six months, I’ve used this blog basically as a place to dump all the thoughts of a day out of my mind, a process which, while being quite therapeutic, probably yields incredibly uninteresting reading. Not that I’m just in blogging for the popularity – readership really isn’t my primary concern. But I’m realizing the power of the blog platform and that it’s totally within my reach to do something awesome with it.

So with that new knowledge (or assumption), I’m going to attempt and change the focus of this blog just by changing what I write about. Expect much more knowledge to flow forth from my brain to yours.

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Why are we addicted to social networks?

Posted on 22nd March 2011 in Something Daily

I had a facebook account for about two and a half years, a time during which I used it, as many of my friends did, for the bulk of my social planning and interaction. For a while, mainly in mid-high school, I accepted it as the status quo of social life.

The reason I originally stopped using Facebook, back in October, was that I felt like it was becoming too much of an artificial world for me personally. That is, I started to notice that a lot of the social constructs it creates that were causing me anxiety were, in fact, totally artificial and unnecessary for my social life. Like I’d meet a cute girl in real life and then immediately be worried about how long I should wait to friend her on facebook, or why she hadn’t written on my wall yet, or something like that. Facebook was becoming way too much like real life, in the sense that its constructions were affecting me in a very real way.

I understand that the type of issues that I mentioned aren’t the fault of Facebook at all, but rather a result of the manner in which I was causing myself to experience it. They all stem from some deeper issue with me, I’m sure, but I noticed that a convenient way to get rid of that issue was to just delete my facebook. So that’s why I don’t have one anymore.

It just occurred to me that I would be a decent subject for a study on what happens to a mildly social internet person when you take away his facebook. Going in, in October, my first thought before actually doing it was that I would be completely free of the restricting online atmosphere I found myself in, that suddenly cutting my lifeline to my social network would cause me to happily revert to the use of phones and email to do my socializing. This was initially the case after I went through with the deletion, but, predictably, it lasted for about five days. That was how long it took me to realize that I needed some kind of online presence (for what reason I don’t know) and to set up this very blog. Also, about two weeks after that, I registered on Twitter. It would seem that, although I fully expected at the outset to be more or less content with no internet life, that ended up being very far from the truth.

The week of no social networks and my continuing lack of a facebook have both helped me appreciate telephony more than I ever had before, both for its convenience and its intimacy (compared to text-based internet communication), and this is a continuing process. Despite that, it seems that I was, for whatever reason, compelled to reassert my online identity hardly a week after ridding myself of it. The question on my mind now is why did I feel that need, and why am I now compelled to collect and hoard Twitter followers and blog readers, just as I hoarded facebook friends before? Is it a psychological issue that some segment of the population suffer from that causes us to seek the approval of people we don’t know? Quite possibly – I’m not at all ready to throw out that hypothesis. But what I’m more inclined to believe is that this issue is something that many (if not most) of my generation experiences. I don’t know, but I imagine it affects (or will soon start affecting) younger generations as well.

I feel like my generation (I’m lumping into that category people who were in middle or high school in 2004, the year that Facebook launched) have developed a compulsion to be connected to the world at all times, mostly through the internet. A lot of web companies started to blow up right around the time that socialization was becoming important to people my age, and the influence of organizations like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Bandcamp, and Wikipedia is clearly visible by the impression they’ve left on our worldview. In a sense, these organizations have grown up with us. It’s uncommon these days to find a person between 17 and 25 who doesn’t have a facebook account, and even less common to find one who doesn’t use any social networking services. The point isn’t “check out how many people in this age group use these sites”, but really it’s “why do they all use them?” And that is a pretty good question.

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An Aside About Blogging

Posted on 21st December 2010 in Something Daily

I’ve noticed that it’s really interesting for me to go back to some of the first posts I made on TSM and see how differently I approach the challenge of blogging than I did when I was starting out. You can tell, if you read the first week or so, that I really had no idea what I was doing when I started out. Every day it’s a different kind of post; usually short and singularly focused. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I know what I’m doing (unless you want to believe that, in which case: rad), but I can at least say that I understand a little better how to write a blog than I did back in October.

It’s often challenging coming up with interesting content, especially when my modus operandi is to use my recent activities as a jumping-off point. That strategy usually works pretty well when I’ve been doing lots of interesting stuff, but there are times when that’s definitely not the case; that’s when it gets tricky to come up with content. I’m preparing for what I’m sure will be a dearth of interesting events over the January part of winter break by taking notes on things that I could write about when they occur to me – finally giving my sweet Uglydoll notebook a workout! The interesting content thing won’t really be a problem until then, with Christmas and new year’s and all that, but I’m getting ready.

So, if you’re someone who comes around here often, thanks for stopping by. And stay classy. And thanks for stopping by. Really, it means a lot to see that I get a decent number of views. And, by the way, if one day you happen to wake up and find yourself in an existential quandary, full of loathing and self-doubt, and wracked with the pain and isolation of your pitiful meaningless existence, at least you can take a small bit of comfort in knowing that somewhere out there in this crazy mixed-up internet of ours, there’s still a little place called Three Stegosaurus Moon.

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