The Failure of Shared Experience.

I stumbled into a TED talk by Shekhar Kapur who launched into his approach to working and living, referring to it as throwing himself into a state of panic, using that as a way to rid himself of his mind.  We are the stories we tell ourselves — we exist because we tell ourselves stories. My stories are visual, creativity for commerce, and moving house three times in one year to find I could not create commerce purely online. Always the sense I was not doing enough of the right things. Location may have little to do with it but not everyone can live in the woods with a fast connection and make a living. The commercial stream has to be pulled to your desktop.  If projects don’t come to me, I need to be going to commerce. Real connections, face to face, by phone, or referral, email — what have you, remain essential for most small business even though most of the work will happen on the web. My products are not obvious so I have to go and explain them to the market. Social media is also not live. It can get close, but it is not live. Sometimes the very ingredient that’s missing is that live-ness. Having an extra thousand pictures on Flickr doesn’t bring me shared experience. Neither does using as many bits of social media as one can possibly handle in the waking hours. Better to read a contrarian’s point of view once in awhile. When I read through social content, what stands out is the difference in the quality of comments between people who actually know each other and those who are just more ‘friends’.  Online media and a shared interest is not shared experience. All the little apps such as posting where you are standing or eating, or going, or reading — who cares? Sometimes it seems it’s all a mass posting of some stuff one runs across and feels this need to share. I do it too. It’s about a neediness for real community and a lack of discipline. What I learned this past year was how impersonal online relationships are. I need to make contact with people, with teams. Nearer the center of the concentric circle — real networks. Then I can share my abilities and interests across media. Dabbling in social networks by posting cool stuff for others to see and hear, all the while collecting more friends is an entirely different activity to making lives that work.