I redesigned the look of my website – adding the big yellow “news” button on the intro page – with two goals in mind:, firstly, to entice people to check out the news/blog and be entertained anew while revisiting the site, and secondly, starting to write a lot more, hence producing the news!
Expressing what I think about, what I care about, what I worry about …what I read about and believe to be valuable enough to be shared with my readers, too.
It was the repetitive mantra of quiet many friends who told me to write: you have an opinion on anything, so much to share and say and you are hugely entertaining, you make us laugh And think!
But I learned pretty fast that it is much harder to write well than to speak eloquently -sharing a great conversation, where one retort spurs another and stories are spun and woven naturally, is considerably easier to pull off entertainingly than my attempts in capturing respectively conveying some sort of spontaneity and flow while writing!
I decided to adhere to my friend Deepa’s advice: just write, don’t censor yourself while doing it and give yourself some time to practice; you may get better at it (and if not, I can always simply stop, right?)
I believe the main reason to be the “unknown” audience; not knowing whom I address, what this person who pressed the news button is searching for and expecting, why she or he arrived at the site: looking for landscape service, a table fountain, an article, the pink luminescent color “Tropical Sexy Pink”… or …me (by far the most uncomfortable reason I can think of)?
Frankly, I think it’s a lot more fun and intellectually challenging to have an interactive conversation than a monologue with an unidentified human with access to technology…
Which brings me to the subject of my pondering of today: the anonymity of the gazillion numbers of “friends” people have on face book… and the anxiety this cyber “competition” seems to elicit.
I recently read an article in a Swiss paper (such is the convenience of the internet, it allows me to follow up on my fellow Swiss’ worries and sorrows half a globe apart) that the fake, made-up and highly over-extended, over- polished, over-exciting lives of their facebook friends renders their own real lives boring, mundane and utterly not worth living!
It was reported that more and more (especially young women!) seek the help of psychotherapists as they feel wholly inadequate and therefore extremely lonely: not enough friends, not good enough looking, no adequate career, no boyfriend or husband, and so on…
Which made we really wonder: how can they not be aware that people may assume completely made up identities in the cyber space? How can they believe what they read (and see for that matter!) and compare this to their very real lives?
Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher, wrote an essay “On Bullshit” (because there is SOOO much of it) and then followed up with an equally well written and argued essay on “Truth” .
Quote – If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact and truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific nature of our own identities. How, then, can we fail to take the imprtance of factuality and of reality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth? We cannot. - Unquote
To all the internet induced depression sufferers: read the book and re-evaluate your position on both issues!
I am not very interested in the cyber world of “avatars” and “youtube”- glory and I always wonder, when and how people actually get anything resembling real work or real life done, with all this twittering, facebooking, sms-ing etc going on…
