From Revelations.
Tag Archives: facebook
steve cutts – are you lost in the world like me? (2016)
Another one of Steve Cutts’ dystopian cartoons is HERE.
on this day (2012)
well, that escalated quickly.
This is what Facebook is really for. Here is a funny conversation that evolved into a collaborative portrait in layers on my wall over a few hours today, a particularly suffocating Monday. I’m keeping this as a snapshot of what creative people used to do when bored silly with social media in 2014.
Photo by Julia Mary Grey, Kalk Bay harbour, Saturday 8 March, 2014
By Gareth Jones, in response to comments under the original image
By Jean-Pierre de la Porte
Meanwhile, on another thread…
By Gareth Jones, third iteration, after further comments under his first drawing
the notebook: it’s ok to live life offline
Excerpted from a thoughtful piece by Kayli Stollak, over at Hello Giggles.
Painting by Francine van Hove
Online we tell a golden version of our lives filled with accomplishments, strictly (and often unbelievably) fun times, and a never-ending well of wit. The glorified digital narrative that we construct of our lives worries me like a 1950’s housewife watching Elvis wiggle his hips on TV. Our modern-day record keeping seems wildly inaccurate to the truth of our inner lives. What is happening in our too-much-information-nation? But more importantly, what is happening with us? Behind all the selfies and sandwich shots, who are we?
In order to correct the imbalance of truth, I propose we start writing it down. We share so much of ourselves with the web, but do we take enough time accounting for our private lives in realm that is removed from the world of likes, comments and followers? The idea of keeping a journal is nothing new, but we’re living in a time where we could benefit from taking a personal inventory of who we are, lest we deceive our future selves through our revisionist digital autobiographies.
While our faces are buried in our phones, we risk missing the smaller details in life. If we don’t remember the bad, how can we possibly enjoy the good to the highest degree? With time, I’m concerned we’ll look back at our Facebook timelines and mistake the façade that we presented of ourselves as fact for who we actually were.
As a writer who spends a large (and probably unhealthy) amount of time writing about herself, I often hear the condemnation of navel gazing. Sure, it is narcissistic to think your life is exciting enough to put to paper, but is it really more self-centered than a side-angled pouty pose of you enjoying your fun-filled Saturday night in the club, posted to Instagram with hopes of garnering likes from your followers, confirming that, yes, you are hot? I would venture to say that the former is self-reflective and productive, while the latter is vapidity and belly-button eagle eye-ing at its worst.
I’m not recommending you go all “dear diary” and start documenting your daily rhythms by laboriously chronicling what you ate for breakfast, the jerk who cut you off on the freeway, or what your plans are for the weekend—if that works for you, do it, but there’s no need to pen a three volume memoir. What I’m championing is the process of jotting down your feelings, thoughts, conversations, inspirations, events that meant something to you now that you might benefit from reflecting on in the future. This is a dose of honesty for you today, in five months, in ten years, at 97. To look back on after your next break up, when you’re contemplating marriage, on your graduation, before a big interview, or simply on a rainy day.
Your notebook should be far from the manicured image you pimp out on Instagram, Facebook, OKCupid, etc. In Joan Didion’s 1966 essay “On Keeping a Notebook”, written before our over-stimulated minds were flooded with technology and its never-ending distractions, she explained, “We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées, we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
For me, a piece of ‘mind string’ is the harmonica chords to ‘Piano Man’ scribbled in my notebook from 2008. A stranger might assume a bizarre Billy Joel fixation, but when I revisit them in my journal, the mess of notes and the triggered sound insist on memories of a motorcycle trip through Spain and feelings of maddening love. All you need is sentence, a word, a thought, and suddenly you remember who you actually were.
If I skip forward in my notebook to 2009 I stumble upon a string of doubts, the point where this love began to unravel. The same way the smell of sunscreen can instantly bring back memories of summer, a list labeled “Pros and Cons” reminds me of the creeping anxiety I felt for planning my future. My Facebook timeline, however, tells a different tale of a giddy girl with bangs who enjoys raves, beaches, and doing the limbo.
Didion advocated for the importance of preserving a part of yourself that in time you can return to. She wrote, “It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not… We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what screamed, forget who we were.”
Notebooks are fantastic tools for keeping in touch with our former selves that go far beyond the sculpted image we present on the web. I love delving back into my journals from middle school to the present, not because I’m a fan of the person I see there, but rather because I understand the benefit of knowing her.
Painting by Francine van Hove
I want to yell at my thirteen year-old self to please take off that padded bra andstop being in such a rush to grow up. I want to hold my fourteen year-old self and explain to her that you are the company you keep and the sooner she starts loving herself the better. I want to bitch slap my sixteen year-old self, she was one angsty girl. I want to tell my seventeen year-old self not to mistake lust for love and to please stop talking to that boy in the band that told you he learned how to play “Brown-Eyed Girl” for you when, in fact, your eyes are green. I want to stay up all night talking to my twenty year-old self, feeding off her energy and drinking up her thirst for spontaneity. I want to see the world through her eyes, she reminds me to believe in magic. I want to whisper in the ear of my twenty-three year-old self, and tell her that soon enough she will see that it really was a means to an end. I want to tell my twenty-five year old self to trust her gut and not settle, I want to remind her what love looks like and tell her that this is not it. But I can’t tell her any of that. All I can do is learn from her mistakes, be reminded of what to hold meaning to, take note of her intuition, celebrate the coincidences, and enjoy all the beautiful moments and connections made.
Although I already know how most of the stories end, it’s important to track the progress I’ve made, reminding me who I am and who I was. To draw my own attention to the larger patterns my tendencies and predilections make when I can see them from a bird’s eye view. A notebook can serve as a wake up call on what I may be rightly or wrongly romanticizing and what I may be purposefully forgetting. Notebooks give us a shot at staying honest and in touch with ourselves, something I think we should strive to be in this digital age.
Read the full article HERE. Thanks to Stella for sharing it.
funtime
Diary. Nov 2013: Facebook..
thoughts on meaningful work, 14 november 2012, 5:38 a.m.
What follows is something I wanted to blog from Turkey in November but was unable to due to lack of an internet connection at the time. I woke up very early one morning, typed it into my phone’s notes app, half asleep, and promptly forgot about it. The incredibly tedious work I am currently doing (editing an MSc thesis on anthropometric measurements for office chairs) reminded me of its existence. So, two months later, here it is.
Arif Cerit with the farm dogs, Shanslar (Lucky) and Beyaz (White), at Pastoral Vadi. Photo: Rosemary Lombard.
Last night I had a profound conversation, in my bad Turkish and his bad English, with Arif Cerit, a guy who lives at Pastoral Vadi, the organic/permaculture farm near Fethiye in South-Western Turkey which I am visiting – working in exchange for food and a bed. It’s a very comfortable bed, in a neat, well-appointed cottage designed and built of cob (straw and mud) five years ago by Ahmet Kizen, an architect passionate about sustainable living and ecotourism who bought this farm 14 years ago and opened it to visitors about 7 years back. No maintenance has been necessary since the cottage was built, I’m told. The thick walls keep it cool during the day and surprisingly warm at night.
So, back to what I wanted to blog about, which has resonated for me with my friend P‘s latest gier on Facebook, which involves a sort of Dada/absurdist attempt to animalise interactions. Having been away and in limited contact with everyone, I haven’t had a chance to ask him more about it, but, basically, instead of clicking “like”, he types animal noises. “Baaa, baaa”, mostly. For me it draws attention to the essentially animal nature of human interaction, which we have become unconscious of and detached from, as we live large swathes of our lives online, “denatured”, unquestioning. “Like” has become a capricious yet ubiquitous form of social capital. Facebook’s shady manipulation of this currency of late has triggered consternation and outrage. They’ve put in place algorithms that restrict the “organic” (terms such as “organic” and “viral” in the world of virtual memes are interesting in their ironic detachment!) reach of posts on the network, requiring one to pay (“real” money) to secure an audience greater than an arbitrary sliver of the profiles to whom one is connected… Just when I thought it was because I only had a sliver of die-hards who actually enjoyed what I post anymore, I realised that most of my Facebook friends no longer see my updates in their news feeds. What a relief (?). The virtual landscape increasingly resembles a targeted marketing environment more than it does a communal hangout, a place for exchanging ideas and thoughts, as it used to. Now it’s mostly about Profit. By monetising the prominence of posts, equal access is effectively being stifled. Concomitantly, freedom of association and meaningful interaction are withering.
That’s another aside, or, rather, more context. ANYWAY. So, what I gleaned from my conversation with big, friendly Arif was that he had been a taxi driver with a fleet of cars in the west coast city of Izmir for 21 years, before dropping everything and moving here to the farm. He sold his business, gave the money to his brothers and left it all behind.
He says that the city is a big jungle, very dark, very dense, very dangerous, full of artifice and chemical poisons. People are a species of animal, he says, like all animals… In cities you have to be a predator to do well. If you are not a predator, you have to live your life very small, like a rat, to survive. Your mind is very important, he says. The chasing after money and things that you need to do to live in the city takes up all your time and your thoughts. Money is a cancer. TV is the morphine you need to kill the pain at the end of the day: the pain of your mind being eaten away.
Out here on the farm, life is real, he says. There is space, there is ground, and air, and the smell of greenness. Animals who are not predators can live happily, widely, openly, productively.
Processing pomegranates by hand to make nar ekshili sos (pomegranate reduction). Photo: Rosemary Lombard
Sticky, crimson pomegranate juice is running down my arms and dripping off my elbows. I’m stained with the joy of manual labour. It’s so satisfying, this repetitive bashing of crates and crates of halved fruit to knock out the arils, then the squeezing in a bag to extract the juice, which is then boiled over a fire for ten hours to reduce it to a dark, tart syrup, then strained through muslin into bottles. It’s slow-going, messy, tiring work. I have blisters, purple palms. But, at the end of each day, I can see the results of my time spent. It’s nothing like the virtual world of work I mostly inhabit, where I shut down my computer and a sense of the hours and hours I have spent shunting pixels around evaporates.
For so long now, my life has felt paper-thin, no, thinner, as if I barely cast even a shadow of influence in the world, and I realise now that it is largely because of the intangible nature of the work I have been doing, which mostly involves cleaning, tidying and correcting other people’s writing, or recording their work, or facilitating their conversations… It’s all work towards actualising goals that I have deemed worthwhile; nonetheless, these are goals which are not my own. I have tried to frame them as my own, tried to see my part in the whole as indispensable, my purpose as contiguous with that of the projects’, my place as “a tiny cog in the great wheel of evolution” – that was how Billy Wilder put it, writing the words of Ninotchka played by Greta Garbo in Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful 1939 satire of the same name.
Alas, my heart just hasn’t been convinced. I haven’t been able to shake this unbearable sense of lightness, of the unnecessary breaths I’m taking, of the lack of any other humans who truly require or desire my existence, irreplaceably, here on Earth. All this needs to change if I am to remain sane when I get back. Living with a heavenly purpose is too far beyond me. I’d be satisfied to have done with consumption, thanks. I started this blog in an attempt to make something indelible of the ephemeral. I need to do more. I’m starving.
“If I had an orchard, I’d work till I was sore.” ~ Fleet Foxes – “Helplessness Blues“.
Sweet! A break to drink some freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice. Photo: Rosemary Lombard
$pin$ta!
Sarah (Facebook status update): ”Spinster” is such a horrible word. So I am coining a new word for myself: I am a $PIN$TA, so watch out or I’ll set my cats on you.
Lizza: Yo, $pin$sta! It’s like a combination of spin and sista… works with the headphone look [in your profile pic].
Sarah: Yo homie! Thanks, although I fear those headphones are more ‘gamer nerd’ than ‘Dre’.
Lizza: Hey, being a murderer and stuff is too tired already. Kill them with your MIND.
Djf Head: It’s one of the few remaining words that closet misogynists get to use when they want to make a point without invoking obvious indignation. So please take it and transform it and own it.
Sarah: Yes but still “do you want to come back to my spinster pad?” is unlikely to work. It evokes visions of a giant sinister man-eating spider. *shudder*
Lizza: Any way you look at it, you have to end up being a goth :)
Sarah: A gangster goth.
Lizza: Yeah! Solid muthafuckin GOLD spiderwebs with diamonds on.
Sarah: LOL!!!! I’ll put chrome rims on my doc martens (sp?).
Lizza: Oh.my.god. and fluorescent lighting underneath, like a gangsta car. Imagine when you walk…
Sarah: That’s mental :D
Lizza: Judge Dredd would totally shit himself :))))
Rosemary: I like this entire conversation.
fleurmach 