Little did I know these don't work that way. Not only do you have to make a blog, you have to be the one to populate it with content. Who ever knew the internet would be so hard?
The blog is called Semper in Excretā. Which is an excerpt from the Lord de Ramsey in 1998, more or less it means "always in excrement". Which I feel is a fitting title for any addition to the internet because, regardless of what you think of yourself, it's always important to remember who and what you're surrounded by, and in the internet's case, it's a pretty easy guess.
The blog is called Semper in Excretā. Which is an excerpt from the Lord de Ramsey in 1998, more or less it means "always in excrement". Which I feel is a fitting title for any addition to the internet because, regardless of what you think of yourself, it's always important to remember who and what you're surrounded by, and in the internet's case, it's a pretty easy guess.
And speaking of the internet, my latest cause of frustration has been non other than our good ol' Facebook. It has in the last five years completely restructured socialization. Unfortunately these changes aren't (for the most part) for the good. There is an inherent danger in creating a website that allows you to recreate nearly every step of a social life online, and it is this:
Think back to when instant messaging first came around. You were so excited to talk to your friends that you would rush home so that you could sign on and be on all night, ready for whenever the familiar sound bites signaled the arrival of a "friend". Then when the great forerunner, Myspace, first emerged from the primordial ooze of social evolution. You would find yourself avoiding instant messenger, hoping it would give your friends a reason to comment on your page instead in hope of increasing that ever absorbing page view count.
We constantly avoid the most expedient means of communication in order to take advantage of the most tantalizing and distancing ones. Text messaging and instant messaging replace phone calls, "posts" replace instant messaging. Status updates replace posts. The further we distance ourselves from whom it is we are attempting to communicate with, the less we have to think about who it is we are communicating with.
Online evolution is reverse evolution, slowly reverting our spines back to a gelatinous state in which the thought of facing someone with whom we are "great friends" with online in person fills us with reticence.
The worst part about it is Facebook has reached a point where it is just too heavy a grain to bother going against. You could delete your Facebook, you could cancel your unlimited text messaging plan and switch over to actually calling and meeting people face to face. But few others would, leaving you high and dry in the social world.
Facebook is not inherently bad, there are many people who use it as an ancillary to socialization quite well. I'm not one of those, which I suppose makes this whole spiel a sort of reaction-formation defense. I always take the path of least resistance. If it's less confrontational to text than call, I'll text every time. What's that you say? It's gotten even more distant than texting? sign me up. Technology pulls us, particularly me, further and further away from one another while creating the illusion that we've never been closer. -What a load of excretia.
