Monday, July 02, 2007

the medium is the message (or, Why I need a break from facebook for a while)

dreaming is one thing you can't do enough of. No more status updates beginning with the words "Kristin is..." Atleast for a little while. Time to get back to me, the girl I'm s'posed to be.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. His are not the simplest theories to understand, but they relate to communication and the media, and they related to individuals too. Simply put, the technology that we use changes us insofar as it changes the way our mind works; our minds will mirror the technology with which it must relate. This has ramifications for society at large as well. The virus that is facebook has infected all users with a new way of thinking. After a few months of relating with facebook at a fairly intense level, I started to notice that I am not really the same me anymore. My opinions and feelings and thoughts have not changed, but the way they are processed has changed, and so has the quality and depth. I am not enjoying my life as deeply as I should be, and I miss that. For my personal life, there is nothing more important to me than my mind and my thoughts - and I really do feel that they have suffered.

Also I am not as self aware during the challenging parts of my life either. The last couple of years have been very difficult for me, being in a constant state of flux unable to really transition or become accustomed to anything before the next change... so I've been rolling with the punches okay, but one difference I have seen lately is that I am not really dealing with my feelings about any of it and at times I am completely unaware of my feelings. My mind-space stopped resembling my blog, and began resembling my facebook profile. It's all surface, without any thought for what's underneath. And what's underneath is what's important. When I was all about the blog, a reader could pop in and check out basically any part of my thought life. But since I've been all about facebook, all you get is a status update with a relatively low character limit that forces me to define my life in a sentence or two - as long as I can start with the words "Kristin is..."

When surprising and wonderful things happen, I want nothing more than to be able to dive in just feel everything. I want to really be alive, not just online.