the ship has sailed

i've been listening to loads of TED talks (they have a way of restoring my faith in humanity, as well as making me think). somehow, i always end up on the tech ones or the ones that are talking about the future of the internet or educating through gaming (those gaming guys have no respect for apple, and they just totally did not see angry birds coming). one thing that i think is in the future of it (but which hasn't been mentioned) is that we'll stop capitalizing it. that's totally unnecessary (of course, i largely dispense with capitals in a general sorta way, so i would think that).

but it has me thinking about the whole social networking thing that is going on in the world today - gmail, facebook, twitter, flickr, instagram - just to name the ones i check in on every morning when i wake up. and that in turn makes me think about content and the emphemeral nature of it. once you put it up for all to see, is it still yours? you have no idea what people are doing with it unless they tell you - desktops, screensavers, tumblr blogs, links on their blogs, advertising for their stallion, advertising for a castle in lithuania - you just never know. and it's the risk you take when you put it out there. that people will see it. and that they'll like it or relate to it. invite it in.

so all of this rabidity among some flickr folks just puzzles me (no new incidents have happened, i've just seen some dire warnings on photos and profiles of late). if you don't want anyone to see your pictures or react to them or relate to them, don't put them online on a site that is designed for exactly that. and just relax a little bit. you have to give something of yourself to get something in return - it's part of the social contract.

just think about music and news and magazines...so much free content is available today (i spent half my evening on the new york times website). and images are a big part of it. if we're going to share our images, someone's going to appropriate them. what you have to do is something to add value to the sharing...make cards or other photo-related art available on etsy. someone who tumbles your photo on their tumblr blog isn't going to bother to do that with your images. and if they saw it on flickr and liked it, chances are, they might be interested in buying your cards featuring it. good things can come of sharing. 

i think new models of defining intellectual and creative property are on the horizon. i'm not sure exactly what they are, but the outlines are beginning to be there (the apple app store is a hint of what's to come). but the world is overloaded with input, so i think people should just be glad their work is seen (especially on flickr) and if they want to profit from every instance where it's used or linked, find other ways or don't put it there.  the ship has sailed, my friends and we have to decide if we're onboard or not.

saturday night creations

two pairs of earrings, made from gorgeous things i bought from etsy, plus beads from the bead shop near nørreport station. thank you, sandra from mimosa and jennifer from field and sea for the inspiring "ingredients!!" i absolutely adore the idea of sitting in denmark, combining ingredients from new zealand and canada. you just have to love the internet.

musings on the blogosphere

over the past few months, i've been hanging out (a lot) in front of the internet. i found out that it was HUGE. i found out that you can find tons of cool stuff out there. that there are people who have a lot to say. i've read a lot of what they have to say and now i've become a bit more selective than i was in those heady early days back in january.

i had actually created this blog back in 2004, but hadn't done anything with it in more than 3 years, so part of what i did was come back to it. i can actually see, reflected in my own writing here since the beginning of 2008, the effect of those other blogs i was reading. i tried on some of their voices on my way to finding my own. and i did it all for myself, not ever expecting anyone else to find their way to it and read it. now a few people have and i find that i like it! it's fun and it pushes my thinking and improves what i'm reading out there myself. and that is very cool.

which leads me to musings on what it means to get to know someone. to become friends. can you do that by just writing and reading? or do you need to meet face-to-face? i thought about the authors i love. even when it's fiction, i think that often there is a lot of the author there in the writing . i feel, in some sense, like i know barbara kingsolver or siri hustvedt (my recent complaints about being a bit tired of her notwithstanding--i do still like her stuff very much). if i met either of them, i feel we'd have no trouble having a conversation. i have a sense of the manic personality that was dostoevsky and would have loved to hang out with him and partake of the madness. just as i would have loved to have known in real life (not just through books)--dorothy parker, alexander blok, anna akhmatova, constantine cavafy, franz kafka, anton chekhov (i could go on and on). i've been lucky enough to correspond with some of the authors i love who happen to still be alive--dubravka ugresic and andrei bitov--and although we've not met, we had plenty to talk about because in a sense i knew them through their work.

is it the same with blogs? to me it seems that it's perhaps even more so, because often people are so personal in their blogs. you can get a sense of them through the stories they choose to tell. that will either speak to you or it won't. i've found that now, after 3 months of intensively reading a huge array of blogs, i've gotten a better sense of what speaks to me in this new medium. at first, i was dazzled by all of it. now, i have narrowed my focus, gotten more selective. i read blogs of people who i'd like to know in "real" life, not just in the blogosphere--people who challenge my thinking, people who make me feel like being a better person, people who make me want to feel generous of spirit, people who i'd like to have over to dinner.

the blogosphere has been a place of healing for me over the past few months, as i recovered from my previous job. it is indeed a wonderous and interesting place. i feel as if i've found some friends here. maybe this is human evolution in action and i'm not only witnessing, but partaking of a cultural, social, evolutionary shift in the way humans interact and find their way to one another.