O Brave New World That Have Such Ugly People In It. Let's Start At Once!

"It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons--automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information; real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers. 

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself."

 Hello. I hope you enjoyed that. It is an excerpt from Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. I thought it was a good tone-setter for my first blog. With the advances in technology, people are becoming brochures of themselves. Whether it be facebook or any other social media site, people are putting their entire lives and personalities into convenient profiles for others. I am guilty of this, so no calling me a hypocrite, but unlike so many, I do not care for it. Yes, it is nice to be able to keep up-to-date with so many of my friends, but do I really need a website for that? Couldn't I just call them? And that raises an even bigger question of " Do I really want to know what they are doing every possible second?", and more importantly, "Do they even want to know what I am doing?"

These questions affect most of us. We sit and wait by computer screens looking for the next notification like crack addicts. Our phones are now a fashion accessory that must be taken with us everywhere for fear of missing a potential comment. I hate my phone. I hate your phone. I hate the fact I cannot have a conversation with one of my roommates without him checking facebook, or watch a movie and he ask me what happened or what was said because he missed it while he was checking facebook. I hate even more the fact that he calls me unsociable because I do not feel the need to take my cell phone to get groceries at Wal-Mart.  If this blog post has made him seem unlikeable, he isn't. Actually, he is a great guy, and if you checked out his facebook you could see that he likes music, has interests, likes books (even though he doesn't read), and even has managed to fit a few quotes on his page that he found funny or inspired.

But that's my point. How is he any different from you and me? You may look at my profile and see that I like Ghostbusters, Charles Bukowski, and that I worked in the post office at OSU. You have probably already formed an opinion of me just from that, and that's fine, we are wired to do it now. But do you know WHY I like Ghostbusters? No, no you don't, but if we were talking to each other, then I would tell you why and you would laugh your ass off, but you don't get that with the brochure Kyle, only the real one.

I am not here to badger you. I am not here to be a social conscious. I am just here to tell you that you and I are so much more than just 162 characters (or less).

P.S. Not every post will be about such heavy handed subjects. Most will be about my writing, or just whatever is going on around me. I just wanted to set the mood for us.