Whether I can truly put into words what I want to say remains to be seen (or read). I have written before about the mind-fuck that I call Surfing the Timeline and my slight obsession with the past, present and future from the perspective that I am now existing where an entirely different world was, yet on the same soil, and no doubt where another will be.
I think about these things constantly, and more so when I am questioning where I am, and where I want to be. Right now I am wondering what the next step is, feeling pretty unfulfilled and unchallenged in my routine day-to-day, totally fulfilled in my social day-to-day and with the knowledge that it could change in a heartbeat as it has so many times before.
Social media binds us. We criticize it and yet can't stay away from it. We wonder to ourselves how we existed without the ability to immediately contact anyone and yet we did. As did our parents who likely looked at us rushing to the telephone straight after school to call the friends we had just spent the day with, wondering how they coped with even less ability to connect. We feel a need to share information immediately and often things that are quite trivial. We "check in" EVERYWHERE, we upload pictures of EVERYTHING, we HASH-FUCKING-TAG without any thought as to why #'s were created in the first place. We blog.....thinking that the world truly is interested in what we have to say. We read articles about how one-dimensional this all is, that it creates depression and is an indication of how lonely people are, how self-centred we have become, and how the world we see online is so very far from the one we live in.
But what if we just forgot about all of that for one moment? What if we let the self-indulgence be that, the instant gratification be instant. What if the "like"s of the instant uploads aren't that different to the joy we felt when we went to collect our spool of photos that took 1-hour to be developed?
Imagine if we could surf someones timeline, who lived 500 years ago, and see what they posted? What a gift it may be to get an insight into their life. I can't do it for my dad, or anyone before him. I sure would like to. I can't do it for my sister, but given the notion that once it's out there, it's out there means that in 500 years someone may just surf mine. And they may get a glimpse into my one-dimensional (and pretty kinda happy) life. And because I won't have children, or grandchildren or great-grandchildren I may just be remembered. I often take my dogs through the cemetery and there are really old tombstones, some with the writing so weathered that you have no idea who they belong to. I read the names and the dates, and calculate how old they were in my head, and I wonder what their life was like; whether someone thinks about them today. Imagine if I could surf their timeline.
