I was sitting in my car today, at a traffic light on the way to York University. I was about to rid myself of my Honours Essay, which turned out to be 93 pages in length, and had made me very, very tired in its production. I was feeling a rare concoction of feelings, now that I think back. The recipe would have consisted of a large bag of butterflies for my stomach, some visine for extra wattery eyes, a bad case of insomnia, some deep cold for application to the brain in hopes of inducing numbness, an extra bright flashlight aimed at my face to allow for intense squinting, a horse named charlie to kick both legs as a punishment for days of inactivity, and a case of redbull to cause a bit of shaking in the limbs. It wasn't pretty. But I remember looking out the driver's side window of my vehicle as I sat there, frozen in time, jittery in this surreal position that I had only imagined in the preceding months--and I had imagined it to feel much better than it did. And then there they were. Snowflakes.
Tiny, little, cute, frigid, icy, white, god-forsaken, good-for-nothing, SNOWFLAKES. In the middle of April... DAYSSSSS after it was 24 degrees. Figures, no?
But here's the point of this post, and it's a good one I assure you. In my moment of total absent-mindedness and the unwanted reminder that I live in Canada and not Cancun, I automatically thought of updating my facebook status with some clever little quip about how it's snowing in April. Thankfully, I look out for myself, and I make sure to give myself the least amount of armaments when I'm out on the road. My severe lack of a 'smart'phone meant that I had no means of updating my facebook status, and thus saved my 500 contacts from having to read another fact about the obvious conditions of our shared surroundings. But more importantly, what technology has allowed us to do now, is in the absence of another person to annoy with redundancies about... the weather, for example, we use facebook as our 'buddy' to confide in. Except, when we post on facebook, we have a vision of about 10-15 people reading it and totally lose sight of the fact that there are upwards of 500 lives which could possibly change upon stumbling on our comments about snowflakes.
Oh the fun of social networking.
2 comments:
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April 12, 2010 at 3:44 PM
It's too early to tell... it's certainly one of the biggest, most revolutionary, and powerful things to ever happen to humanity... and each time something like this happens it can take many, many years to truly understand the effects of it. Take the French Revolution of 1789 - we're still trying to grasp the magnitude of it, even today - some credit it as the start of modernity - others the best thing that has happened to government. At the time, wasn't it just a bunch of lunatics running around screaming, setting things on fire, and chopping off heads?
April 11, 2010 at 8:42 PM
It's amazing how the world we live in is changing at such a rapid pace. I can barely keep up.
It's interesting that amidst all the excitement of the car ride to school you had that one moment of focus as you watched the snow fall. Life in Canada seems to be changing with the times.
I wonder if we could do a social media count? Set up some parameters to judge and see how often we access a social media site... say facebook? Plus the amount of messages we receive on the site. Perhaps we also include the email notifications we get to say that something has happened on Facebook? What do you think?
At the heart of it all do you think social media is good Ric?