Wednesday, October 05, 2016

I'm a time traveler. (Or at least my blog is)


The day is October 5th, 2016.  My last entry over 4 years ago.  Four years ago I thought blogs were already old.  When I started blogging god knows when (I refuse to look back at the earlier dates) I even thought blogging was old.  So now, we live in a world of Instant Information Social Media, and I can't help but laugh when I use this form of historic documentation.

What is my life when I come back to these sporadically updated pages to see huge chunks of time unaccounted for?  I suppose I can see if twitter and Facebook can fill in the pictures.  Maybe I can look up family members I was with during holidays and co-workers during events, and piece together my existence by showing up on a corner of an image stored in someone's phone and a kind word written on someone's Facebook page during their birthday.

I think aliens or people from the far future are going to have a fun time scouring records and piecing together disjointed media to recreate the life and times of your average human.  Sure, some millennial (yes we use that word now) might give an easy account of their life as they lived it through an amalgamation of Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/Twitch/YouTube.  I'm sure that'll be the easiest way to formulate a picture of the modern day self logging narcissist of the New 10s'.  Believe me, it's only going to get easier.  5-10 years from now people probably won't even have to press a record or a submit button or type a single word for their day-to-day actions to be recorded in 8K Ultra-Def VR.  The space to keep such things will be nearly infinite and wireless and the pipeline to deliver that information will seem light-speed compared to today.  So it's not impossible, as cars have dash cams, and police have body cams, and people have smart phones that are literally smarter than they are (and the infancy of self-driving cars) that in less than a decade the ability to log every single nano-second of ones life will be so easy, and so shareable.  Your genetic structure, what your current biologic status is, the percentage of water or sugar or fat in your blood will all be part of this quantum data collection of you as the individual.  And as science continues to make our world bigger, yet closer, individual existences will be insanely massive, a set of data that lives in the seconds in fat chunks of information that can be sold or shared, or traded.

That was quite a rant.  Not a meaningful one either.  Your casual web journalist is thinking of the exact same thing.  They have to.  They need to produce click-bait so they can have a meal or pay back their massive debt or mortgage.  They need to think as abstractly as the philosophers of old not because they were drunk with their friends and staring into the night sky with only their thoughts to bounce off each other, but because they have deadlines.  They need to grab attention.  They need to think of the next philosophical question or the newest device, or the trouble with the current generation so that people will read and have something to post on their social media site.  Post it so their friends think that they think a certain way.  You aren't your trapper keeper anymore.  You aren't your MySpace page.  You are the varied memes and articles, and status updates you decide to share with others.  That's now your identity.  You're the politics guy.  You're the cute kitten girl.  You're the one who frustratingly puts up an article of the failings of your local sports team on Monday, and your heartfelt re-posting of  a tragic police shooting on Thursday.  You are thoughts and prayers.  This online facade is an ideal extension of your introverted reality.  While you can't control your weight, or the loan that you're defaulting on, or your relationship with your father or mother, you CAN control whether or not you feel so sad that Prince or David Bowie died.  You can put a rainbow over your icon to support gay culture.  These are your clothes you wear when you show up to that Endless Classroom in your Internet High School.  Notice me.  See what my choices are.  See what I am made of. Judge me not by who I am but by what I share.  Because I am what I share, and the one behind the computer is merely a vessel of what I want you to see.  My edited personality.  

In the immortal words of Ron Burgandy: "That escalated quickly"

I have 14 minutes before my mother picks me up from work, and I discovered my blog through my Yelp Reviews.  I didn't realize how easy it is to pop on and drop a stream of consciousness rant.

BUT IT IS.

See you in 4 years.


Mood: Fat Food: Too Much Exercise: Non Existent Condition: Contemplative