Our Places in the Library

At the end of the last post, I used the imagery of talking to an empty room to describe this blog's influence. In my first post, I mentioned why I created this blog: a desire for self-expression. But it's easy to ask what the point of self-expression is if there is nobody to witness it. From the outside, it would seem that the self-expression taking place is more about feeding narcissism than any other goal. The self-expression appears to take place solely for oneself and even if it supposes to take place for others, the message is so buried by anonymity that its presumption to be worthy of attention by anyone (concluded by its existence in the first place, which is wholly voluntary) installs a reflex to view any exhibition of someone's public self-expression as a desperate vie for attention and celebrity. After all, the number of individuals with blogs, Youtube channels, Instagram accounts, and other platforms for individual content creation and sharing, is staggering. Out of all of them, very few are famous or popular in any sense. Meanwhile, the number trying to emulate them is, simply put, very high.

Of those content creators and sharers which become popular to any extent, most have simply gotten lucky at gaining a big enough audience to become renowned. It is why the word "discovered" is sometimes applied to these people; they were discovered like gold in a river of stones and dirt, and we, their perceived-to-be untalented peers, are the stones and dirt. For those who are "discovered" who actually have a sincere talent, that comparison can make some sense, but for those who rely primarily on their personality to sell themselves (such as bloggers and Youtubers), it is much more of a game of roulette when showing that you have something to prove--you have to get your audience to like you more than you need to get them to like what you are doing.

The fickle and luck-of-the-draw nature of that kind of celebrity combined with the easily calculable odds of actually achieving any kind of renown makes the idea of putting effort towards sharing oneself in an anonymous public space seem like a waste of time (as well as narcissistic, as mentioned above).

However, we can see even in the earliest recordings of history that the individuals who made impacts on the world and solidified their legacy were just that: individuals. While some were destined to be remembered, mainly those of born into preceding nobility and prestige, many that we learn about and venerate today came from obscurity. It is easy to come up with a dozen names of people who have followed this path. Just the same, it is easy to recall the names of those predetermined to be written down in the history books but decided to go ahead and exceed the expectations set for them.

All of their stories tell us that every individual can make a difference and the key is to believe that one can. Nowhere is this better summed up than in Irving Goffman's "dangerous giants" theory, which asserts that we all have the capability to become entities much larger than ourselves and influence society. We choose not do it because we believe that that we are too small, that it would be awkward and humiliating to try, or that other people are meant to do that but not us.

But time and time again, history proves that it is normal, common individuals who are often the ones to boost themselves to notoriety and leave a lasting impression on humanity. Always central to their success is their belief in themselves and their dedication to their work.

Therefore, while it is very understandable to view individual attempts at becoming known in the public space (and especially the Internet) as so fruitless as to be delusional, history demonstrates that it is a noble effort. It is why this blog was created--not just because I wanted a space to share my writings, but because I believe that the attempt to share them has meaning.

I would encourage anyone else to do the same--the world requires more people to step forward and try to make a difference. If it does not happen, then only the select few who do try will succeed and their success is not always positive for others. By greater participation from greater numbers can we expect a greater world. And, speaking for the individual, consider how big your book in the library of life stories will be. Consider how big the splash from your rock thrown in the ocean will be. Is it not obviously more admirable to try to make your book as thick and colorful as possible, or to make the splash as big and rippling as it can be?

Greatness may sometimes choose us, but only we can choose obscurity.

The Medium and the Message

I like to think that I am a vociferous person when it comes to debate and discussion. I enjoy the battle of words, ideas, and evidence, which challenges my memory, critical thinking, diction, elocution, and more. Debate and discussion make me feel simultaneously intelligent, in that I am smart enough to engage an opponent, and humble, in that I know there is always more for me to learn and that sometimes I am wrong.

Because I enjoy debate and discussion so much, I often find myself participating in them with many different people through many different mediums--email, Facebook, Youtube, news articles, and in person (of course).

Not so often anymore but occasionally I will encounter someone, usually through some form of social media, who states an opinion that I will counter, and then at some point after my rebuttal they will decide to disengage from our communication with the excuse that "it's just Facebook" or "it's just a Youtube comment," meaning that I took what they said too seriously because of the medium through which it was said.

I hope that anybody who follows that line of reasoning will drop it very quickly because the suggestion that the medium through which a message is delivered alters the seriousness or meaning of the message is an obnoxious cop-out.

Consider cyber-bullying. Whereas previously, bullies had to resort to either physical proximity or perhaps even the phone to intimidate and put down their victims, they now have a wide array of electronic mediums through which they can reach their targets with the exact same messages. As evidenced by the effectiveness of cyber-bullying, the change in medium does not change the significance of the message.

The only caveat is that with bullying and trolling, anonymous bullies or trolls from the internet can largely be ignored because of their absence of standing in the eyes of their attempted victims--just the same as an anonymous person on the street can be ignored if they hurl insults because the receiver of the insults has no reason to take the words of the insulting party seriously. However, if bullies or trolls appear with a noticeable and constant presence, those factors can place self-doubt in the mind of the victim and add significance to their message.

However, cyber-bullying is separate from debate and discussion and so a person's thoughts, feelings, and opinions do not become any more or less legitimate based on the medium through which they express them. Besides a desire for self-expression, this is one of the reasons that this blog is underway. Although it is essentially addressing an empty room, the words spoken in that room have the exact same meaning as they do if the room were filled, or the delivery of those words were changed.

In short, feel free to express yourself openly and in whichever medium you choose. What matters is the motivation behind the message.

Introduction: Creation's Pair

Anyone with a modern education--or at least a connection to modern society--is aware of the concept of yin and yang. The concept of yin and yang itself is predicated upon an almost instinctive tendency to label things as coming in pairs, duos, dichotomies, or other measurements of two potentially contrasting halves. Some examples are light and dark, male and female, East and West, salty and sweet, rich and poor, liberalism and conservatism, and so on. Some are antonymic by definition and others are subject to shades of interpretation. Some are things upon which this site will focus in future posts.

The one pair on which I put focus now is the act of creation and what would be its opposite. If playing a word association game, it would be reasonable to suggest "destruction" as the antonym of creation. While undoubtedly true in an abstract, dictionary sense, I believe that in our daily lives the proper counterpart to creation is not destruction. For us, destruction is not so common and often hardly dramatic: a shirt ruined in the wash, a shattered drinking glass, a knocked over tower of wooden blocks, etc. Most of the destruction we witness occurs far away and is delivered to us by the news or video websites: plane crashes, exploding warzones, Islamic State fighters destroying human heritage sites, natural disasters, and so forth. Real, life-changing, terrifying destruction.

In the past, destruction was the reasonable choice as the opposite to creation, back when wars razed whole continents, disease and poor medicine promised short lifespans and high child mortality, and when life was nasty, brutish, and short for just about everyone. Now, in a time more peaceful than ever, with a greater understanding of our world than ever, and with a standard of living higher than ever, destruction is barely a worry to the First World mind.

Instead, I believe that in this age of prosperity, consumption has replaced destruction as the antonym of creation. Central to this change is the growth and development of tools and communications which allow content of greater breadth and depth to be delivered to the masses instantaneously and often for free or a very low cost. This content is public or easily accessible to the public (either free or available through simple payment) and can be informative (news articles, tutorial sites and educational videos, etc) and/or entertaining (comedy, music and music videos, video blogs and memes, etc).

As a result, the average person has an impossible amount of content they can consume in numerous forms. Conversely, the norms of everyday society have culminated in the common experience of working a 40-hour, five-day week in a position that likely focuses little on creating--particularly creating the content that the individual would actually want to create. At the end of the day, people tend to contribute to something--a work project, a volunteer organization, raising their children--but hardly ever do they manage to create, particularly something from their thoughts and imagination.

Meanwhile, consumption is just that much easier. It demands nothing of the consumer except their time and attention in return for enjoyment. Creation, on the other hand, requires the creator to be active and involved, and depending on what is being created, it can demand more time and money than consuming, thereby making the decision to create more stressful than the one to consume. Why else do we we admire people known for creating--writers, actors, musicians, painters, YouTubers, influencers, and so forth? Their lives are spent creating while ours are largely spent consuming (and consuming what they create, no less).

Speaking personally now, the time I spend consuming is time I spend putting off creating things that I want to create--novels, stories, scripts, videos, and more. Since creation is a large part of self-expression, and self-expression is hardly limited to solely artistic endeavors, this journal is one thing I have set out to tackle as a part of pushing myself more towards creation than consumption by using it as an outlet for articulating in writing my beliefs and opinions, most likely those related to religious, political, and social issues and happenings.

Here we go then.