I'm a people watcher. Always have been.
I get excited about the way people interact with our fellow human carbon footprints, their delivery and presence. The way people put you inside a box, test you with various routines and challenges. I spent a good chunk of my teenager years backed up against the wall of a nightclub over a decade ago listening to a 'tom' style character from 'middleofnowhereville' tell me how his wife was a bitch and rarely gave him sex. It was important to tom that he told someone you see. Fast forward to today and we have social networks. Where sometimes you care very little if anyone responds but you got your message out and sometime blag yourself into thinking your problem had been dealt with my sharing. Rub in a little bit of facebook for pain relief and a side order of twitter for pre-fabricated notions of people you think really exist behind that avatar and your good to go.
I used to concentrate too much on the actual conversation, assuming that honour and straight talking would enable those opposite to me to be frank back - but really establishing truthful, direct links with people on a human one to one level with the everyday dynamics of navigating our fragile souls on this bowl of dust is actually a really hard thing to do. you see we have personal firewalls, emotional deep rooted personal baggage that never quite arrived at the airport of life - we just collect it in a 'whydidthishappentomeagain' fashion and push forward to happier climates enabled by the 'oneclicktobuyhere' nature of the web and the pure crack inspired overdose of ideals and possibilitys of browsing a friends lifestream - we are containers of the march of the ideal world but the randomness that it is to be human. you can track it with stats and you can wrap it with ambient information but we are creatures of habits - the enabled ones. the keyboard thrashers - the digital nosey parkers. Are we not incredibly lucky to be alive in this space with all these droning data vats of human knowledge sitting waiting, watching.
It's good to exist between the pipes, a digital hippy riding the halflife tubestation of progress. watching the human race unbundle and distribute - will digital countries all exist to the same ideal, will we have digital nations with one mindset - and will they all move to belgium? - so i say this, enjoy the information and the conversations that you are privy too - but also seek out the message in the static - tune yourself in, the world is bigger than your ability to press the mouse button.
keep producing the media. sometimes the quality is not in the conversation but the unsaid nature of the way that media is delivered. may empathy become a digital asset that us early social ninjas will serve up like a precision blade of timing and clarity for the undiscovered country dwellers. let others rejoice in the connections and knowledge that this connected world brings.
keep sociable.
1 : inclined by nature to companionship with others of the same species : social
2 a : inclined to seek or enjoy companionship b : marked by or conducive to friendliness or pleasant social relations
