Earlier this morning, I was thinking, “Be here. Be present. Be now. We ask a lot from our future selves. We need to expect a lot more from the moment that is here and now.” That string of thoughts was sparked by my digital experience earlier in the day.
Recently I have noticed that my digital experience feels very disjointed. I have more ways available to communicate with folks online than ever before. The rise of messaging applications a decade ago has been matched and probably surpassed. Right now it shows me being available on a ton of services. Some of them are social media related. Some of them are just messaging applications. A lot of them are tied to my phone number. Overall it is highly disjointed. It is not overwhelming or anything. It would be very easy to just power my phone off and step away from my computer. That would pretty much eliminate all lines of digital communication. It just falls short of feeling connected in any meaningful way.
All of my online efforts pretty much run through my functional journal (weblog). That has worked well enough for the last decade. However, I started wondering if Mark Cuban is right about permanence within social media. Cuban favors a form of limited permanence. Each utterance would pretty much have a clock on it and it would disappear when the clock runs out. My writing efforts are pretty much available in perpetuity. Some of my writing efforts reach a wide audience. Some of them reach a very small audience. Both of those outcomes work for me. My writing efforts are almost exclusively about collecting my thoughts and moving forward. Put simply — I write, because I like to write. My efforts probably should be more focused on having an impact on the world around me and making a difference. That type of noble pursuit is something I find compelling. Obviously, it does not define my every move.
