reappraisal

shoegazing

The light from the TV is blue, is it making me blue? The tube harmful after all, even the LCD screen, it is hard to accept. "Talk, talk, it's only talk," went the song. The screen that nursed me through life now hurls it back at me. Soon it will all be indexed.

But for a box full of paper journals? I wonder what value they hold. Will offline information become more valued, the lower number of readers a dynamic like limited edition prints? I doubt it. It'd just be inaccessible words.

Publishers of hard copy things still value the exclusivity of an offline manuscript, though. I think, that it limits the potential audience if you're trying to reach masses. Maybe that's a good thing, though. Maybe locks and paywalls and password protection need to shield my words from random eyes, or maybe it's the other way round. Both. In either event, I don't like that the volume of my words in general has decreased so much. Context, I fit things to narrowcast but it is maybe silly to bother when it's still archived in the same melting pot and anyone could hit it with an unrelated phrase or keywords.

And not care, and keep searching for what they really want.

Or sum up and judge my character in under 400 words.

Everyone hates me.

In a dinner conversation (sorry, no video, that'll be the next big archive) we older people wondered if those in their teens who think it's no big deal to live sans privacy mostly think so because they lack the perspective that large chunks of years give. Definitely when I was younger I didn't think about impressions of an older me. Not until many years of a very public diary experiment went past did I realize how it is to be a much-changed person who didn't want to be associated with, nevermind summarized and judged by, dumb mistakes and hurtful things from my past. I don't think you can grasp that at 21, even with growing up online. Maybe I'm wrong. But the stark permanency of youth is embarrassing. I have a friend who writes funny outrageous things on the same site his CV is available, both under the same name. He declares this is who he is and people in the future will just have to accept it. I can understand that. Maybe what he doesn't get is that he might not accept it himself later.

Feh. Neither do I want to disown my past, even though years have changed me. I just think it needs some sort of gating system. Keeping it all offline or password protected seems too extreme, just as keeping it all available in a one-word public search does.