so I've had this nagging feeling for the past month or so that there are people who used to read my blog here who may at one time or another wanted me to send them copies of The Christian Radical. Since I've lost touch with virtually everyone I once read and conversed with here I've also forgotten how to reach many of you. If you want to you can write me at
i.am.using.the.internets (at) gmail (dot) com
if you are someone who months and months ago wanted to get copies of the zine but never recieved them and would like to just ask and I'll start sending you copies and direct you to where you can read back issues. Just specify if you want to get the online edition or the printer-friendly version.
This blog won't be deleeted however I am never posting in it again. I have a new blog which I will be using from now on. You can read it if you care to, it's at http://wasp-water.blogspot.com/
I have spent all of yesterday thinking hard about the questions I raised for myself in my previous post and the answers I came up with aren't ones that please me. I've never denied my own dependance on the internet but I have never done anything to reign it in. As a result what I wanted to leave benhind by getting rid of my TV I embraced instead in the form of a wireless connection. I don't like what it has done to my free time or how it has shaped my relationships with the real world and with those friends and family members whom I love. I becomes too easy to direct people towards a blog instead of actually answering the question "so what's new in your life" and it becomes too easy to spend the best hours of the day fully absorbed in a world of text and meaningless entertainment. That's not to say that my experience here as been meaningless, on the contrary I've met some truly amazing people on Live Journal, and many of you read this blog. I guess what I'm saying is that I can't keep this up any longer and feel good about my life at the same time. I'll be keeping the blog up for the next week while I save various things I like to my hard drive but intend to delete this account on the 20th.
I won't be severing all my ties with the www however because I have things, like the radical and spartacus books which require that I maintain an e-mail account. this is the adress where you can e-mail me, I hope to be able to stay in touch with as many of you as I can, you are all my friends and I hope we don't lose contact.
i.am.using.the.internets at gmail dot com
you can also send mail to 103-2239 west 1st ave
Vancouver BC Canada V4L 2H7
sayonara
Who once was broken_anthem but now knows better.
find it interesting sometimes how my general frustrations with people are always the strongest when related to internet and text based forms of comunication. I fancy myself a fairly personable individual most of the time and when I am in a conversation with somebody face to face oftentimes I find comunication easy and am fairly good at resolving conflict. I think this could be said of most people, when they are meeting face to face things work on a more civilized wavelength but as we start comunicating more and more through media which reduce our intrapersonal contact, our shared sense of amiabillity and openmindedness, or our civility and our ability to relate becomes stunted.
If 90% of all comunication between two people is non-verbal then already with the popularization of telephone and cellphone technology we have taken 90% of our ability to comunicate effectively and thrown it out. So assuming, liberally perhaps, that 5% of the last 10% of our ability to comunicate is done with inflection, stresses and tone of voice then, with technologies like Livejournal or messenger or sms our ability to talk to one another meaningfully is reduced by another half. What does this mean? this means that for all the time I spend online be it on msn, or on lj, or writing e-mails, or participating in forums, I am actually barely intelligable, and so is everyone I converse with.
I think that ultimatly this is going to wind up causing very serious long term problems for every net-dependant person in the world. With the popularisation of text based comunication and abbreviaton based slang and other text-based slangs like 1337 and it's decendents we are forgetting how to relate to one another personally. The internet is like a big mascarade ball where we hide behind fabricated personas and handles and where even our most meaningful internet relationships lack the warmth and compassion that one recieves from actual human contact. We are losing our ability to comunicate and are desperatly trying to reinvent the wheel with text. Originally I was going to use this as a preface for a rant that I posted to Anarcho_Folk about how our divisions and internal conflicts, exacerbated by text-based frustration and flame wars are keeping us ineffective as activists and as people, but I'm starting to think that what I'm writing now is more pertinent though totally interrelated.
What kind of threat does a mass movement exert on authority if the movement is entirely online? What use is trying to share ideas and complex theory or difficult problems if we can only use 5% of our ability to comunicate? How could it do anything but cause conflict when two people who differ strongly on a topic (or believe that they do) come to loggerheads with oneanother on the internet? With only text to comunicate with the natural first reaction is to assume that one is being attacked by the opposing view. We have no other way to guage things, it's a dissagreement, our judgment which in person or even over the phone might allow us to react differently, now gives us only two options: fight or flight. Most people not wanting to back down from their position if they feel strongly enough about it will naturally fight. So one person responds in a manner that is offensive or abusive or just mean and that sparks the flame war. With only a goofy image to designate that there's even another person there at all it becomes second nature to let loose with no reservations. After all, even though intellectually you are perfectly aware that you are talking with a fellow human being, possibly even someone who if you had met at a party or a protest might become a friend, your emotional side sees nothing but the goofy picture and a bunch of words, and the words are cold, or insensitive, or hurtful. These words make you feel worse, sad, depressed, angry and hurt and so you retalliate. And even if what you reply with is compassionate, albeit stressed out, even if you try and counter emotion with reason, there's no way for the other person to tell for sure that that's what you're doing and there's no way for you to tell for sure that their words were intended to be as malicious as they struck you.
So I ask again though a little rhetorically, what is the use? I always get to thinking about this after getting into some kind of internet scuffle but it does bare thinking about. What kind of world do we each want to live in? The text based one here in cyber-land surfing between one website and another like we used to surf channels desperatly looking for things to entertain us, to keep us amused or to satisfy our own fascinations? Or is the real world better? Are the relationships we create with people online any more or less important than those bonds of friendship we have fasioned in our towns, neighbourhoods or sceenes? Are they of equal importance? And how should I prioritize these new relationships I find myself a part of? How should any one? If the old addage is true and a people united can never be defeated then what can be said of a people who are only united over the internet and only on the condition that we can all agree upon what it is we are saying to one another? Are we just as united when we take part in an internet forum as we are when we march in protest? Are we in a comunity when we share our blogs with one another in the same way that our parents and grandparents were in a comunity when they went to block parties or borrowed eggs or flour from the folks in the house across the street?
How many of us know the names of the folks who live across the hall from us? Or the name of the guy who vacuums the carpets in that same hallway? How often do you visit your friends without planning it days in advance? I for one have rarely visited someones house just because I was in the neighbourhood without calling first I'd wager it's the same with you reading this.
I could probably go on but it's late I'm tired and I'm sure you get what I'm saying... all 5% of it.
I really really really wish people didn't act like they need an intellectual babysitter to nurse them and coddle them and do all the hard thinking for them.
why is it so difficult to encourage critical thinking?
HATE SPEECH IS NOT FREE SPEECH NO to HATE and ISLAMOPHOBIA NO to WAR and RACISM
The Toronto Coalition to Stop the War is calling on all its members and supporters to join a rally against hate and Islamophobia this weekend to protest the publication and distribution of deliberately racist and Islamophobic images in Denmark and around the world. Far from upholding the principle of freedom of speech, these images have targeted a community already experiencing increased racism, discrimination, harassment and, in some cases, violence since the tragic events of 9/11. In addition, these images have only helped to bolster a generalised Islamophobic sentiment that has been cultivated to justify the so-called 'war on terror.'
We make a special appeal to all our non-Muslim members and supporters to demonstrate to our friends in the Muslim community that they are not alone in their opposition to the distribution of such offensive and insensitive images. An attack on one community is an attack on all of us.
The Toronto Coalition to Stop the War is opposed to all forms of racism and has consistently mobilised against Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and racism since we came together as a coalition. Join us on Saturday to show your support and solidarity.
RALLY AGAINST HATE AND ISLAMOPHOBIA Saturday, February 11 2:00pm Danish Consulate 151 Bloor Street West (east of Avenue Road)
Please note: the rally will take place on the NORTH side of the street, opposite the Danish Consulate.
Endorsed by Toronto Coalition to Stop the War
TCSW is Toronto's city-wide anti-war coalition, comprised of more than fifty labour, faith and community organisations, and a member of the Canadian Peace Alliance. www.nowar.ca stopthewar@sympatico.ca
So in the late morning/early afternoon I'll be heading over to Todd's place for day one of recording a folk album. I've got 12 songs (10 mine and two by Lead Belly) I've got some basic idea of how I want things to sound and all the instruments I should need to accomplish the sound. I've even got an album name and a name for the project. I played through the list of songs right before coming on LJ to write this and I should have gone to bed an hour ago but I'm really excited, I'm also trying to reign my ego in... it's neat to be able to say that I'm going into a studio to record an album and I'm very pleased with all of my songs, but if they don't come out well or if nothing more comes of it than none of it really matters. I've always had ego problems, when I was in highschool I sufered from a very inflated sense of self importance and egotism and it did me very little good, actually it did me no good at all. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing once it's been done and burned. It's not like I'm on a label or even really part of the scene, I can count the number of shows I've played with these songs on one hand and have no real way of getting any more in the near future, unless I book and promote one. I guess I'll just have to shop the CD around a bunch and see what happens. Regardless I'll be getting a buskers liscence soon that will at least ensure I get a lot of practice. I restrung my guitar tonight, I should have probably done that a few days ago but I forgot to. Anyway I need to get to sleep I have a big day ahead of me.
I have read a number of opinion pieces recently on the cartoons published by a Danish newspaper satirizing (poorly) the prophet Muhammed. Anyway I got this in my e-mails today and of all the things I've read by anyone these folks unsurprisingly have the best handle on the situation, if the world listened to the voices of people like these folks more instead of allowing their own judgement to be clouded over by rage, bigotry and retribution (on all sides) then I think we'd all be a lot better off. anyway you can ( Collapse )
Obligatory lame post, making myself vulnerable, but it's true so here goes... If there is someone (or if there are someones) on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.
Oh man, I've been really on point as far as song writing goes lately. I've been firing them off quite often and just getting better and better at it. I don't mean for this to sound gloaty or anything, it's mostly that for four years I put my guitar down and told myself that there was no point any more and that I was never going to ammount to anything musically. It was a hard thing to do and my life was very boring and sad, I tried really hard to avoid being reminded of my days of playing and writing every day and then about a year or two ago it just started coming again and now I've got my callusses back and all the music I've been learning and writing has been so good. There is more to it than just me picking up the guitar again. I have been praying about this for so long, I think in a lot of ways without realising it, and then after coming back to Christ I actually did start deliberatly praying about it. It probably sounds strange to some of you reading this and it isn't intended as proselytization but I can feel God's hand in my music and making it fills me with such joy. These days I listen to music by people like Nick Drake or Johnny Cash or Cat Power and instead of feeling empty and remorseful I find it hard to keep sitting and not get up and start making music of my own, and it's beautiful.
