I was looking over some of the more personal writings on my site and I realized something. Blogging has taken over as my preferred source of expression, which is fine, but it comes at the detriment of my other writing endeavors. Like my former attempts at writing poetry. Or even just ranting. The thing is that while blogging is nice for recording snippets of useful information or getting off a frustrated complaint of some sort, it really isn’t the same as a complete essay-rant about what’s really going on. And the problem with is that I’ve been spoiled with the instantaneous nature of blogging that I’ve lost the patience now to sit down for twenty minutes and really write something. I should have realized this sooner. At first I thought that I was just lacking in inspiration nowadays, but that’s not really true. Inspiration comes in many forms for many different feelings – there is always something interesting to think and write about. Iit is far more accurate to say that it’s really an issue of my rapidly shrinking attention span.
And this is due in part with changes in how I interact with the world around me. One of the more depressing realizations about myself in recent years is that I’ve become an avid consumer of art instead of an active creator of it. I watch a lot more television nowadays, an activity that has long been acknowledged as the leading decimator of attention spans the world over, but worse, I am now almost always tuned in to the Internet. And I really do mean tuned in. I swear, it is the absolute worst for cultivating short attention-span-ism. I mean think about it! Forget about having 500 channels or even having 500 channels and a TV with picture in picture and a TiVo hooked up to it too, you’re directly interacting with an information source – heck, with millions of information sources! – and if you don’t like a sentence you’re reading of if the graphics aren’t tickling your fancy, you just click onto the next thing! Or check what you’ve opened in another window! It is incredibly easy to be completely fickle when dealing with reading newspapers or literature or watching little flash movies or comics. A.D.D. is totally encouraged when browsing the web, and good web designers know this and milk it to the max. It’s quite frightful if you think about it. And this sort of mentality has had a huge impact on how we interact with the rest of the world today. How we process and use information and interact with people has changed so dramatically in just the past couple of years… and it’s still changing.
So here’s a brief observational history of the web and online interactions.
When I first came to UCLA, it was the cool/geeky thing to have a website. And have a website I did! I hard-coded my HTML, learned javascript, how to nest tables, how to deal with browser compatibility issues and so forth. WYSIWYG editors were still frowned upon, although they were beginning to get popular. Web design was still in its early stages – the biggest thing was using tables instead of frames to manage content. And it was still limited to the relatively geeky folk. Like me.
My freshman year was also the year ICQ started taking off. Back then, ICQ was the chat client of choice, and with icq99, one could hear the “uh-oh!” and the typewriting sounds emanate from dorm rooms up and down the hallways. People began using their away messages for cute slogans and short comments.
Enter AIM. AIM began getting really huge my sophomore year, and along with it developed a whole new kind of culture of interaction. Not only were away messages used in smart and funny ways, personal profiles began to be the home to more cute slogans, personal statements, expressions of certain philosophies, and a general place to rant off. Comments are longer, however they are still not archived.
And nowadays, it gets to the point where these short, expressions are too long for AIM profiles. So subprofiles began to take hold. And when that wasn’t enough, people finally began blogging.
This is where geekdom and mainstream tech expression kind of coincide again. In a year, blogging went from something a few techie geeks do to something plenty of people do. Xanga has completely exploded in the past year, and it is successful because it took the techie out of blogging and made it kind of cool.
It’s amazing if you think about it, and notice how fast technology is shaping the intricacies of modern interpersonal communication. People now conduct major aspects of developing and maintaining relationships through instant messaging and email, whether it be for business or for personal gain. People have even developed ways to suck up and get back at people. It’s like there’s a whole art now to being overheard. One can indirectly stab someone in the back or continue petty debates, indirectly assert how cool they are by talking about what they did over the weekend, give friends pats on the back, and so forth by simply putting a little something in their AIM profile or weblog, or by blocking certain people when they get mad or selectively sharing a hidden screen name with close friends, so on.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll write a paper on this.
At any rate, my short attention span once again manifested itself, as I diverged from my initial topic of discussion, which actually happened to be about my short attention span preventing me from getting any meaningful writing done. So let me go back to my original point.
Basically, what I’ve found is that my short attention span is really hurting the overall quality of my writing. Now this isn’t a big deal to most people, but I grew up with the notion that my writing was some sort of special ‘gift’ that I had and was basically all I had going for me. Great. And while I take this with a monstrously huge grain of salt and certainly keep in mind my knowledge that I should definitely not quit my day job, my writing has always been (and hopefully will always be) a source of personal gratification.
So that said, my writing being on the permanent ‘suck’ mode that it’s been on lately is a bit disturbing, a mode that is largely due to my shrinking attention span. You see, I have always been an impatient writer, with too many thoughts to get down on a page at once, but I have always throttled my impatience with an anxious desire to make my work read well. This process got me into a lot of trouble earlier in college, since I’d put so much pressure on myself to do something well that I would end up simply breaking down. Very bad. Bad for business, bad for grades. Now it seems that I have gotten over this, with me removing that throttle and simply being completely overeager to put down ideas that I end up not structuring them at all. This only means that my writing sucks even more. AAAAAAAAAH!!! It is so very frustrating!!
ARGH! Enough about my A.D.D.! Onto nostalgia and making myself seem like a productive member of society! Haha.
Ahh… Good old friend nostalgia. It is a wonderful drug. Lately I’ve been looking at my old poetry and writings and have thought about making a zine of some sort and passing it out to my friends. I know, it sounds completely narcissistic, but it’s not, really. Although I will admit it is completely self-centered, because it is my work and the product of my labors. That’s actually part of it, though. I almost want to prove to myself that I can produce something, and that I’m not a completely worthless bum. Now, whether it is actually anything good I’m in no position to say, but the fact is I did produce something.
Unfortunately, the question is raised whether I can produce anything more. I haven’t written a poem in well over a year, and I’ve had little desire/inspiration to do so for quite some time. And you know, you can’t very well self-publish even a small volume of 5 poems, and it would be lame if that were it. Right?
Well, who knows. Personally, I’m looking at my poetry and I think I have maybe one poem that’s actually any good. This poem is the only optimistic poem I’ve written. All my other works are dour and pessimistic and filled with tales of lost and/or longing love. I’m just a sucker like that.
At any rate, I’m thinking about shopping that poem around to some publishing houses and maybe collecting some rejection letters to prove to myself that I’m doing something even if it isn’t quite successful. It’s kind of inspirational, sort of, although it can’t really ride the waves of the current cultural climate very well. Heh.
Maybe I’ll do it. No, I think I’ll will do it!
Heh. Stay tuned for scans of rejection letters as A.D.D.-ridden pearl tries to justify her rather pathetic existence. ;o)
    