I have quite a few other things to do today, but here I am writing a blogpost.
I have been thinking about this online world we kind of live in everyday, and I don't think I could have started this post in a most ordinary way. Maybe that's it, maybe I'm a bit ordinary like everyone else. Because the point is this: everything we want to do in life is to somehow prove to ourselves we are not ordinary. That's the kind of vibe I end up perceiving most of the time when it gets to social medias.
I was reading a book recently, which is called "What if We Are Wrong?" and it made me think, combined to some other things I have been thinking of recently, of how much that scares us. Especially in an environment where anyone can be someone the idea of being no one still terrifies us.
In the past there were less ways in which someone could be talented, shoot out of the average and be selected to be one of the few that was going to be remembered for something incredible. Let's think about books, music, and art. There were a few people doing it, but definitely less than what we have now, so the amount of people that were still doing it but not succeeding or meaning anything to the future world, was less. Everything is more accessible now. Internet opened us to a world of possibilities that could not even be conceived before. Now we are set in a world where you can do anything from anywhere and if you play your cards well - and are lucky - you can manage to make decent music listened by a decent amount of people, publish your novel and have a good number of readers and have your own gallery show for a bit.
But that means that everyone is competition and you are constantly surrounded by the idea that whatever you are could disappear in any second.
I am probably being way more over-dramatic than I should, and I recognise that. There is a big part of me that says I don't really care about any of this, that the online world has never fed me enough to make me feel like I'm on a wave that could fall at any time. I have always been on the edge. I never quite properly climbed that wave.
But then there is a big thing to understand, we are all ordinary. No one is that special in the great scheme of things. Special has become even more subjective. Someone might mean the world to a group of people and be absolutely unknown from the rest of the world.
Instagram where you can be followed by millions just posting some photos. Twitter where everyone fights for the blue tick that verifies that you REALLY are someone. Facebook where we are bombarded with empty videos and cooking videos of every sort, so many that I don't even think I will ever have to think of what I'm having for dinner tonight because anyone can cook. Youtube, where you have a camera and suddenly you can show yourself and what you think and do to the world. All things that were unthinkable once.
I am not trying to bite the hand that feeds me, I work mainly in that environment so I am not going to say everything is horrible about it. It just makes me think of how it made our perspective shift and see and perceive things differently. The online world is somehow still detached to what our real life persona is, and it's crazy to think the building up of our online one is such an important part of our life. And dealing with the fact that we are all ordinary and then fighting to not feel such thing. Because let's face it, if some people were CONSIDERED irrelevant probably they wouldn't be so privileged nowadays.
Which brings us to the real topic: irrelevant-ness. When is someone irrelevant? Aren't we all in the great scheme of things? But everyone's little world is made of people that are relevant and people that are not and so they don't even acknowledge them. But since everyone's world is built around that with internet personal world collides into groups of people that make other people relevant for more to the point that there is a fan culture around them.
I think I definitely lost my train of thoughts by now, I got distracted by a friend in uni and the music is making my mind go back and forth towards tasks that - as you know - is not a good point to reach.
What I'm trying to say is that there are so many things I can't always wrap my head around, which is why sometimes I will give all this new universe a bit too much power over me and will feel overwhelmed. Because it's easy, in a little tiny world where everyone is relevant and irrelevant, to be confused on what side you're on and what actually matters to you. It's something that's so rooted inside us that sometimes the feelings rises before you can even question it.
I recently noticed I like to speak for "you" instead of "I" as if I was never talking about myself. While I definitely won't take myself out of the category.
On the other hand, this is not necessarily just a bad thing. Imagine of all the people who once wouldn't have been able to play music in their little world, and make it there, or have their novel published so that the few who were interested - many or not so many - could read it. How would they have done once? There wasn't the chance. So yes, there is more choice in what is available everyday as well, but also this means there is something for everybody. And therefore we are all someone to someone else's eyes. And sometimes we forget.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento