Or maybe Why It’s So Hard to Blog Again.

Yesterday, after getting evicted from Tony’s Estate over at Ruby Road in Ortigas and finding refuge in a random Family Mart, I got Paul and Tin into thinking about what shifted in the blogging landscape when we were in our twenties (circa 2000’s) and recent years. I talked about it vaguely in my first real post here but it was tough getting a real grasp of what was happening.

See, in my early days of blogging, I had an audience who didn’t know me. I would refer to my employers by code names and colleagues by the first letters of their nicknames and that allowed me to talk freely about my feelings and my understanding of the world. I didn’t really care that anybody cared, but people did use to care. Life was probably still a bit slower then, and the Internet was not as overwhelming as it is now. But much like little towns, in the early 2000’s, my Internet neighbors were a lot more real.

Then very soon, things began to pick up and social networking overtook our experience of the Internet in ways we couldn’t have ever imagined. For all the bad you can imagine it’s done, it also brought about a TON of good, which is probably par for the course when you start talking about enabling tech. Along with that is a pressure to show our true selves online, and while I do understand the benefit and convenience of looking people up to find out things about them, I realize it’s made us a little lazy.

Don’t worry, I’m guilty of it, too. Not about to go stomping around all high horse about it especially since there aren’t a whole lot of horses in Marikina and I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But there it is, still, that weird, suffocating pressure to curate your life. Gone were the days when I can talk shit about a specific day, and not have that singular post define who I am as a person. Nobody goes around reading blogs anymore at least not for the purpose that we do them now.

I’ve always considered my older blogs a safe, quiet place, similar to the empty lot we used to explore when I was younger. Random kids and kids I knew would roleplay in the lot and as long as we were in the confines of that area we were cool and okay and safe to say and be anything we want to be. But now, just like my older blogs, that lot has a Robinsons Supermarket on it now and while it’s super convenient to have a grocery across your house, it also means you no longer see the sun in the afternoons.

I’m probably talking about it too much at this point and I’m probably talking to myself, as well. But, really, I don’t even care anymore. I wonder who else is struggling with the same things I’m struggling with at my age. The rest of my peers have kids and domestic issues and here am I still grappling with grief and singlehood and a general lack of a sense of purpose when I’m not writing.

And maybe that’s what I’m really looking for, someone across the void experiencing the same damn things I’m going through, someone you’re not comfortable showing your face to or your personal details but someone from across the void you can high five again and say, carry on, trooper, we’re all going to die soon and we’ll forget this moment ever happened and everyone who is alive in this world today will likely be gone in one hundred and fifty years and that’s okay, we have these words on the Internet right now and we can be immortal for a minute.

I know, at one point, that I’m going to have to own up to this particular angst and explain why it’s been tripping me up. I see a future built out of videos and new media and while that doesn’t entirely intimidate me it does kind of piss me off. In the science of communication and empathy, while the peak ‘message sent’ is being in someone else’s mind, I think there is still something to say about what Rae Carson (during our writing workshop) calls ‘a reader’s 50%’ or what the reader herself is bringing into the experience of experiencing a story and I’m ultimately more interested in what a thing brings out in a person consuming it than in making sure said person is consuming it in exactly the right way.

And words, to me, remain a superior mode of communication, and someone should be watching out for it. Written language has rewired our brains for all time and it deserves a little more respect. I could imagine a world where written language is no more (we still got sounds and other sensations to send pieces of information with) but language allows us to communicate intangible concepts like joy and justice and devastation and there’s probably more than a little truth to the theory that morality is a higher-order function enabled by our ability to think abstractly–and words are key to that.

Imagine watching a video where someone randomly beats someone else with a bat. Without the words to express bewilderment and need for context and justice and indignation for this random act of violence, we will likely only link the experience of watching it to a concern for our own survival. Without words it’s just a dude hitting another dude and that’s that. No learning, no implication, no action required. Animals seeing a similar scene live may express some minimal form of empathy for the creature getting beaten up, but there is no call for social change, no banding together with other creatures to make sure this never happens again. The fight ends, the creature dies, the animals move on.

But here’s the thing that’s really interesting for me. Sophisticated, systemic evil is also a function of abstract concepts. Surely you did not assume that only good things come out of our ability to have higher-order thoughts. How else did colonization come about, slavery, oppression, genocide?

That’s the inherent beauty and horror of freedom of thought, I think, though I can contest that contracted ideas like difference and segregation and overpowering the minority in pursuit of a false sense of perfection is really just lazy thinking. But I’d rather there be the possibility of that, along with the power to fight it and rally against it, than this creeping feeling I get that we lose our ability to focus on the now, willfully, deliberately, by relegating our ability to entertain ourselves to external media. I see it in myself sometimes and it scares me.