hello again.
today i'm home sick with a combination of s.a.d., allergies, the flu and exhaustion. so, i figured why not use the time/illness to my advantage and write here. care.
i've been thinking about the vapidity of internet/technology-based socializing and how increasingly difficult it is to make and maintain meaningful connections with actual human beings in real space anymore. more and more i find people are morphing into personas that can be easily quantifiable in 140 characters or less, can be easily summed up by a .gif or screenshot of a 20th century ad, and/or a video link.
fortunately it's been a while since the first exchange i've had with someone contains a username or online alias. but i think that's because those same people are too busy checking twitter or whatever to notice. OR maybe people feel more real as their pixilated selves and are conflating their personalities thusly.
and true, this is an online alias from which i write. but it wasn't initially. it just became so because i'm fucking lazy and never truly cared enough to create an entirely new identity. now i feel like it's just become this weird, clumsy vestige of the last decade when a few of us actually made attempts at controlling transference between online and offline. ha! joke's on me! when was i ever in control?
the fourth-wall separating public and private is actually a pinhole camera in my laptop! i should be more honestly me in digital form!
i suppose the appropriate topic to discuss now is the new definition of meaningful. rather, how i see its definition being expanded for these the fast and heady times between the pre- and post- of internet mania. dictionaries pretty much define it as "significant" and "full of meaning." NECESSARY PREFACE: i'm not pretending that the following thought is a new one since new thoughts are like dodos according to the various intelligentsia in my computer. from there i have narrowed it into two internet-based expressions:
- unpostable: something (i.e. an event, person, thought, exchange) that is deemed so important that it is granted shelter from the social networking auction block of diggs, retweets, likes, and automated empathic-inquisitive responses.
- postable: something that is deemed so important that it is dog-and-ponied across digital platforms, shrouded only in enough vagueness to pique interest but is generally a cross between boastful, earnest and provable, unfettered by the desire for replies but bolstered by them nonetheless.
i project that nearly all expressions of meaning for people who spend at least four hours a day online (disregarding the minimum 50% that are extensions of conscientious ongoing lies and all forms of spamming) fall under these two categories. this is for very specific reasons that only we can discern for ourselves since we're all digital rogues who defy normativity, foraging for ourselves in the meticulously programmed and heavily monitored jungle of this Brave. New. World. we are the colonizers of our own lives, and we have the user-specific advertising to prove it.
the largest problem with these two expressions of meaningfulness is that meaninglessness inherently plays an active role. therefore, the converse of each aforementioned expression is equally as plausible. this makes self-brand building hard. interpersonal relationship building, too.
"does he really love me?" and "is he @replying something that will tarnish the image i'm cultivating on my rss feed and what impact will this have on brand optimization?" are rendered equivocal.
understandably, standing in a group of friends who are all retina-deep in their mobile device is fraught with socio-emotional and socio-economical possibility.
do academics and bloggers alike use the term socio-technological yet? because let's face it, social is more a prefix now than it has ever been. and we're all savvy enough to recognize it, especially as we continue to revalue meaning depending on its proliferation within or absence from internet media.
[clicks post]
peace,