When do you feel the most joy? What are your favorite qualities about yourself ? How can you share yourself more with others?
How can I share myself more with others? That’s something I wish I could figure out. The sharing is easy. It’s getting anyone to care that’s tough.
From Twitter to Tumbler, to Instagram to Pinterest, there’s never been an easier way to share your innermost thoughts with the entire world. Art, photography, writing, everything has a readily accessible platform. But, with universal accessibility comes an overwhelming amount of content. No matter what you create or produce, it’s still just a digital letter in a bottle, lost in a sea of cat pictures and competing voices.
So, I cry out into the abyss. I’ve been doing it for over a year. And what do I have to show for it? Six creepy followers, who seem to only follow me, under the mistaken belief that I’m a single woman.
In this era of new technology, our outlets evolve infinitely faster than human nature. The online landscape is dominated by maybe a thousand select voices, parroted and followed by the majority of those online. The sad truth is that original expression is an exceedingly rare commodity…and one that’s not really in high demand. It’s a lot safer to just share and/or reblog the most popular sentiment of the day, than actually put yourself out there. It’s also more gratifying. Watch how many people drop a “like” for something that also appears on their news feed, just because it’s proof that you’re just like them. Posting, sharing yourself ? People don’t know how to respond to that. Nobody has yet told them what to think about that.
It’s like humanity is a herd animal, following only a few shepherds to lead them around the perils of the unknown parts of the internet. And sadly, that’s where most of us reside. Myself included.
As I said, sharing is easy, collecting any notice is hard.
Now look, I know there’s a world beyond my phone. But so what? Even that is accessed by meetup.com anymore. At this point, our digital identities have a more “rea” presence in the eyes of others than well, us. So how do we address this problem? Is it a problem?
I’m not going to pretend that I’d know half of the events in my area, if it weren’t for the internet. But anymore, I keep discovering that these factions of people I meet online only know how to function in that world. When we finally meet face to face, what happens ? They want to share other people’s Youtube videos with each other. It’s about as candid as elementary school show and tell…..
So, how do you share yourself more with others ? Tweet more. Alternatively, I dunno. Go to your public park wearing a sandwich board, I guess. God knows, I’ve tried. But apparently, he local municipalities frown upon such practices.
Maybe things will get better. As society evolves alongside the new communication, it seems like we’d naturally refine the unification of it with our daily lives.
Maybe, I’ll just print a ton of business cards, embossed with NFC chips, linking people to all my yet unread accounts. Or maybe, I’ll just start taking advantage of how many dudes think that I’m a single woman.
Lonely or not, there’s a lot of money I could be making there.
Storytellers at CPA 