Ever since Netflix started online streaming, my ~$20/mo. investment has become a gold mine. Not only can I watch obscure award winners and missed Blockbusters at my leisure, I also managed to revisit my favorite TV shows Bones, 24, Heroes, Lost… I’ve also since made another wonderful discovery – documentaries. From Michael Moore’s Capitalism – A Love Story to the entire archives of Frontline, it’s great to have everything in one place! Yes, I know, PBS also has the entire archive for Frontline, but the simplicity of having everything reachable by a mouse click without even touching the keyboard that appeals to my laziness.
It would be great if everything on the Internet was in one place! I thought. My online presence is so fragmented that sometimes I have a hard time keeping up. There’s Facebook, where I share occasional food and party pictures with 500 of my closest friends and stalk acquaintances I’ve long lost touch with offline. There’s Google, where I share interesting and funny things I found via Reader, and spend countless hours chatting to catch up with people. Then there’s my blog, where I share semi-private thoughts with friends I’ve come to know mostly only through online encounters (and even some strangers). Mostly because of laziness, I’ve managed to separate my interests and thoughts into three almost distinct spheres. I wonder if people only knew me through one social network, they would see an entirely different me.
Speaking of fragmented, I was watching this Frontline episode called Digital Nation, where professors were complaining about how the digitalization of communication has rendered students incapable of communicating entire ideas say, in the form of essays, as they are so used to organizing their thoughts in little pieces. I bring it up because, well, I got distracted and ended up drawing a picture of a zebra to post to FB, and have now lost all interest in continuing. In a different time, I would have wiped this entry clean all together and it would be all forgotten. But perhaps it’s not that bad of an idea to keep these little snippets of me around. However incomplete, random, and incomprehensive they may be, there’s some twisted satisfaction in knowing that some parts of me are leaving marks around this strange interconnected virtual world of ours 🙂
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