Us from the IT-and-new-media communities often feel quite pleased about being “on the edge of things”. We have the ‘net at our fingertips – the shiny netbook, the edgy phone, the niftiest tools. We master the medium. We feel like an elite (or l33t, if you will *cough*).
But sometimes it feels empty of anything meaningful. My father once said about an acquaintance:
“he’s able to spout platitudes in 12 languages”
Implying that speaking 12 languages was all very well, but language is just a way to convey meaning, and if you’ve got nothing to say, then it’s a waste of brain cells.
This is how I sometimes feel about this whole “revolution” that the internet represents. We’ve got a whole lot of tools to communicate with our peers, in sound, in video, in semantic tags. Great. But do we have something to say ?
</dark_mood>
I’v been having this feeling with marketing in IT for years actually. It’s as if the complexity of software paired with the (imhoo too) rapid evolution of techology, allows more marketing crap than in any other market.
How is your wood working thing going?
never really started :-/
Yes we do!
And I ‘m not talking about IT or gadget-of-the-week people! I’m talking about everyone who stands for Free/Libre software. We carry the very important message of Freedom. Freedom of choice in software, Freedom of source code, Freedom of information, and more. We might even be at a worldwide revolution of Freedom in all aspects of human life, Freedom for all people on this planet.
You keep going girl, because the message you carry is the message of Freedom!
cheers,
paul
Or maybe there isn’t much to say after all.
@Paul thx
@zeta you sound even more depressed than I do
Sometimes i have the same feeling of futility.
Retwitting myself “Twit, blog or die digitally”.
Everything is futile. We’re just a meaningless jumble of particles which, for a brief moment in time, happen to compose a sentient being. Nothing we think, do or hope matters at all.
But who gives a damn? Why not communicate in every which way? Who knows, maybe in all the meaningless twittering and twattering, we’ll find something worth knowing.
I rather like this affluence of information — because that’s what commucation ultimately is. Some things are about as boring as sitting through church, while others are profoundly interesting.
At least being able to communicate in various ways over relatively large distances in virtually real-time, makes me feel just that little bit less insignificant in the scheme of things.
I agree with you that it sometimes feels like this whole internet revolution is much ado about nothing.
However, I like to think all of it is just us, looking for meaning and purpose, often failing but still trying; and sometimes maybe even succeeding.
Maybe the internet is about removing some barriers – or to pick up on the analogy your father used: knowing 12 languages might not be useful when all that’s being said is platitudes, but it helps to know them if you’re listening out for something meaningful.
@bram, you have a point, I just wish there was a higher signal/noise ratio
@nona true. If something interested is being said somewhere, the nets make it that much more likely that we’ll hear about it.
I’ll try to improve my own signal/noise ratio then