Welcome

10 Apr 2011 . category: . Comments

Hi. It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, but I’ve got a domain name floating around and I’d like to put it to good use. I haven’t seriously blogged since the days of LiveJournal (remember those?), and most of what I’ve written since then has been short, terse, and (hopefully) a little witty. I was having a discussion about LiveJournal and the way Facebook has taken that role for insecure teenagers everywhere. When one of my friends protested this assertion, saying that Facebook doesn’t have that same level of intimacy, I took a step back and made a meta comment:

the fact that we’re having this convo on Twitter underscores the death of long form social media.

Having thought about that for awhile, I realized that this bugged me. I didn’t like the idea that people were developing shorter and shorter attention spans, and that there just wasn’t any room for thoughtful, long-form content.

So I decided to model for myself the kind of content I wanted to see. After all, what’s life without a little, symbolic, if not utterly futile rebellion?

This isn’t my attempt to replace my LiveJournal with a Tumblr. Let’s be perfectly clear here, the main problem with most LJ posts were that they were one of 3 things:

1. Emotional rants and ramblings
2. Song lyrics that were a passive-aggressive way of expressing item #1
3. Memes like “Which Harry Potter character are you?”

Granted, I was 16 and unsure of my world at the time. But as I look back, I see the same emptiness in my Facebook feed. Emotional rants are passive aggressive statements, the song lyrics have been replaced by links to YouTube videos, and the memes…well, they still haven’t gone away yet. Only now they steal your info. (read here and here). So, what does this little rebellion entail?

Well, let’s talk about what I’m not going to include in these postings:

• Emotional problems. I had no problem writing about these when I was younger. However, as I get older, I find that I can’t responsibly share those feelings with a wide audience of people. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have such problems and that I live in a “curated” reality, but quite honestly, those problems are none of the internet’s business.
• Difficulties on the job. This is an easy one. I’m a professional, and the problems I face at work go away once I take off my badge. Again, I have a responsibility to handle those problems privately with the respective individuals and organizations.
• Status updates The whole point of this exercise is to get away from those short, terse updates. There are other media for that, you as the reader are welcome to follow me there.

Now that that’s out of the way, what’s left to talk about? Well, quite a bit. A few of the things I’d like to hit on:

• Social Media and its day-to-day applications. These days, anyone who’s anyone has both a Facebook page and a twitter feed. But what does that mean? I’m going to try and think about social media and the way it works in our lives.
• Reactions to Technology News. I do not have the resources to cover tech news, so I won’t try to. What I will do, however, is comment on news stories and editorials that I feel merit such relfection.
• The notion of privacy and security on the internet. As someone who spends a lot of time with computers and the internet, I have thoughts on privacy and computer security. I won’t be talking about zero-day exploits and remote code executions, but I do find social engineering hacks fascinating and may share my input on them from time to time.
• Photos/art I may create. I do have an appreciation for the visual arts, but I haven’t really kept up any talents in those fields. In my spare time, I’d like to focus on bringing out more of those, and sharing them with this Tumblr.
• General thoughts on our modern world. If I feel like a tweet merits more expansion, I’ll write about it here.

I’ll do some more thinking and writing in the future, so there’s no sense in laying it all out now. All I know is that I really enjoy presenting and discussing my thoughts, and I look forward to doing that with you in the future. It’s quite late, so it’s time to call this a wrap!

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