April 4, 2010
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three
I'm not fond of titles. I'm very anti-titles for people and somewhat neutral toward titles for stories and poems. But I'm just not fond of titles for essays and blog entries.
The problem as I see it is this. Whenever I write a blog and use a title I then have to come up with an introductory sentence that is not wholly redundant with the title of the blog itself. I am lazy and this to me just strikes me as too much thinking that is interfering with what I find important and that is the business of the actual writing itself.
In addition so many titles are very gimmicky or just plain goofy. Obviously people use titles to encourage random passerby to read their entries whether or not there is any content there actually worth reading. And it works too. Just like controversy draws readers, there are just certain kinds of blog titles that are more likely to get your works read than others. For example, just try writing a blog entry with a subject line in which you call someone else in the community a name. Something like "TheModernBunny is a SILLY BUNNY!" or "Elvesdoitbetter is a DAMN ELF!" or "OMG Did you Know Buckeyegirl31 is a GIRL!" Everyone would think WTF and immediately read those entries to figure out what the heck the reason might be that the person titled the post in such a strange way. In addition people will smell controversy and will flock to the controversy so they can put in their two sense and feel superior to one side or the other. They can go "Mmmhmmm, You're damn right she's a bunny!" Or "How DARE you call her an Elf! You're suck a JERK!" And so on and so forth.
So I think I'll just do without titles for a while. Maybe I'll try them again in the future. For now I'll use numbers. Numbers are nice. Simple. Easy. Clean. And as all math majors and sudoku players know they're loads of fun too.
This morning I woke up thinking a lot about individualism. I'm not sure my thoughts on it are really coherent enough to make into any kind of post so I'll just sketch out a bit of it here. It seems to me that in the United States there's a very new kind of philosophy individualism developing that is sort unique in human history. First we're far more individualistic today than we were in the generations of our grandparents and great grandparents. Back in the day the idea of people contributing money to take care of said grandparents as a collective even if those grandparents aren't specifically YOUR grandparents but they're somebodies grandparents, sounded like a great idea. Nowadays you get people saying crap like "How dare my tax money be wasted by the government when I could invest it and make so much more money for myself!" The latter idea totally misses the point. Social Security isn't a government savings account. It's a vehicle for social collectivism.
But it's not just that. Everything seems more individualistic these days. Schools, hospitals, churches, charities. Everything is designed around this idea of everyone being on their own and having to do their best to survive.
Only it's sort of worse than that too. Pure radical individualism while disturbing can conceivably work as a way to organize society. I think the resulting society would be a soulless, lifeless husk of a society that I wouldn't want to live in, but that doesn't mean it can't WORK. Some people would undoubtedly LOVE to live in a society where nobody helps out their fellow man and everyone takes complete responsibility for their own actions.
But that aint what we got here either. Like I said this is a brand new kind of individualism developing in the United States. It's not that you reap all the rewards of your successes and face all the punishments of your failures individually all by yourself. No. Nowadays you can reap the rewards of your successes and you can totally ignore the external consequences of your actions. In addition, you can expect society to collectively help you out when things go wrong to push you back up to a level of equilibrium.
It's worse than that sounds too. Because we also have a world where the people laboring under those rules likewise express extreme judgementalism against anyone who causes harm to the society provided they are of a lesser standing. Hence people can be disgusted for example at someone who is Obese because they are causing "social harm" in their mind, yet at the same time feel no shame whatsoever about taking loans when their business is failing.
Basically this is an individualism tilted wholly in favor of the people who deem themselves the "best" people. It's a twisted sort of individualism and people on all sides of the political spectrum deep down find it sort of appalling. That's part of why there is such contention in society today. Yet for some reason not only does it remain strong but it seems more and more people implicitly ascribe to it as judged by their behaviors. The prophets who preach of the greatness of this twisted philosophy are not cast low and few are willing to call them on their rank hypocrisy. Rather the angry people follow them who are the very source of the problems that create their anger.
It's a strange world we live in.
Anyway, Final Fantasy XIII is LOONNNGGG.
But maybe I'm just getting old.
Also I went to Noodles n Company for lunch today and I noticed something quite odd. It seems that every time I and friends go to Noodles n Company we end up talking about school, like past educational experiences and the likes. It's quite odd. IT happens more often than if we were at Panera Bread or Starbucks where you are likely to actually see people working on work for school. I wonder why that is. We theorized it might be because they have those weird small little wooden and metal chairs that maybe remind us of chairs we sat in in school when we were kids and that's subconsciously influencing our thoughts. Another possibility is that the people who attend Noodles n Company tend to be pretty young. But that doesn't make sense because today the place was almost empty when we were there. So the chair theory is our best guess.
Anyways, that's it for three. More randomness to come in four. Have a good night and a Happy Easter!
Comments (5)
You can exploit my username for views anytime you like! Perhaps we could go back and forth, insulting each other with our blog titles, but when you read the actual entry it's about the martyr complex of the conservative Christian right or post-deconstructionist literary theory or whatever.
As fir the main topic, I recently saw a discussion (I think it was a TED talk, but I could be wrong there) about how the technology we have today is playing a major role in making our society more individualistic. People spend more time alone, and put a larger amount of importance individual empowerment. At the same time, we use this technology in direct opposition of this mentality. We use the internet to build online communities, we use cell phones to be in constant contact with everyone we know, but we still place an incredibly high value on individualism. It will be interesting to see how this dichotomous lifestyle plays out.
@elvesdoitbetter - If you happen across a link to that talk I'd very much like to listen to it It sounds VERY interesting. It sort of makes intuitive sense. For example, there's all kinds of things people just couldn't find out in the past without asking someone. That means human interaction. But now we just look it up on wikipedia and more often than not get an accurate response. And yet at the same time that extraordinary wikipedia data store wouldn't even exist were it not for a huge global communal effort to gather and organize it.
Human beings sure are funny creatures. Still, I'd be curious to see if this individualism phenomena extends to all cultures and societies that have large swaths of the population with access to modern technologies and broadband internet access. There's definitely to me much more of an individualistic streak in the United States than in other places in the world. Maybe a society with a deeper tradition of community might not adapt to the technology in the same way that we have.
And yes we should totally sling title insults at one another one day! People will think we are absolutely insane. But then that's half the fun.
Found the video!
As an aside, I've been thinking of leaving behind this mortal coil (this mortal coil, of course, being Xanga) in favor of youtube. For the foreseeable future, I don't expect I'll delete my Xanga, or leave the site completely, but I think it's time for greener pastures. Xanga just isn't the place it used to be.
@elvesdoitbetter - oh it's THAT video! I actually started watching that the other day but didn't have time to finish it (or even get very far). I really liked the part about the numbers at the very beginning and how youtube produced more original content in the last six months than the three major networks could have possibly produced in the last sixty years. Really fascinating stuff. I hope I'll get a chance to watch the rest of it soon.
As for you leaving this mortal coil, I can't say that I'm surprised. You're right that Xanga isn't the place it used to be and I find myself barely into it myself. I'm planning on trying to blog every day in April so as to make myself feel better for my utter failure to do so effectively last year. After that, if I find I didn't enjoy myself and it hadn't been worth the effort, I'll try to pick a moment to make my own grand exit from the Xanga Stage and add myself to the ranks of all the other people who have long since vanished (or write so little that they've effectively vanished). Perhaps these thirty posts will be my final monument to my time at Xanga. Sort of like my own Great Pyramid of writing left behind for future Xangan civilizations to unearth.
In any case I hope you'll continue to keep in touch through twitter and the likes and let me know how you feel about your existence in the after-Xanga. I'd be curious to know what other venues you use for writing or will decide to use in the future as I would enjoy continuing to read your stuff. And let me know also whether you find those other venues to be a new nirvana or yet another deeper level of Hell compared to your experiences here at Xanga.
You mentioned youtube? Are you a vlogger then? Or do you make other kinds of videos? I'd be curious to watch those as well. Youtube is definitely a more vibrant community than Xanga is, but writing is still more my thing than videos. Maybe that's part of what keeps youtube so effective at community building. The video making aspect is a kind of barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the world of text communication.
Anyway, thanks again for the video link!
@nephyo - Um... well I used to make videos before youtube existed. Some were sketches, some were fan videos, and and then my best friend and I vlogged our senior year of High school (though it wasn't called vlogging back then. We called it our documentary.) I haven't really done anything since then, because youtube happened, and youtube really sucked until relatively recently.
I'm barely on Xanga anymore, anyway. I feel like we already communicate more outside Xanga than on it, so I don't see why we wouldn't continue to keep in touch. Writing is definitely different than, making videos, so I doubt I'll quit anytime soon. It's just Xanga has sort of left a bitter after taste. All the people that I used to follow have left the site (you being the sole exception) and the whole Queerish experiment made me more or less hate Xanga in so far as it operates as a community.
Anyway, I'll keep you informed on what new lands lay ahead, and you should definitely let me know if you find an awesome Xanga alternative as well.
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