the medium is the message

the title of this blog is a central dictum of marshall mccluhan, a communications theorist. i think it holds true for much of our society today. new media is being created every day, and the nature of media, not the content of it, is often the focus.

but i don't want to be ambiguous here. i'm really talking about myself. in recent months, i've become fascinated by the various ways that people are able to communicate and create via new and emerging technologies. myspace, facebook, second life, wikipedia, slashdot, the heroes 360 experience, blogs, flickr, netvibes, et al. each has its own contained sense of community. for whatever reason, i've been fascinated by it. i would go online and just, i don't know, check it all out. the fact that there are hundreds of millions of myspace pages out there, it just boggles my mind. random people can edit a wiki. major networks are rolling out truly multimedia experiences. and so on.

but here's the weird thing. i'm go to these sites to observe. i'm a lousy participant. i'm bad at email, facebook, personal correspondence of any kind. it's a weakness. i'm not proud of it. and yet i still check out all the sites, daily.

i think for a while now, it's largely out of habit. and some increasing desire to be in the know about what is going on. maybe it's largely spurred by my constant perusing of google news, this unhealthy desire for immediacy which the internet so wishes to provide.

my working theory is that work may not provide the most mentally stimulating environment for me. so i try to compensate by inundating my day with sheer information. the drawback of this is that the drive for information often leads me to spend further time online, and not enough time actually thinking about the knowledge i've gained. it feels surface level. i've lost that analytical spark that i once had. well, i want it back.

i think the latest entries of this blog are indicative of my current state. most of them have sucked, to be honest. sorry about that. i hope that in a short time i will regain what i feel i've temporarily lost. for your sake and mind, it will hopefully lead to some better posts here.