In which Photoshop Victory is MINE, and we discuss the role of Misanthropy in Social Networking

So the other night I stayed up entirely too late trying to combat the annoyingly sterile formatting permitted us- and by us I mean me especially- on this Blog thing. I made a banner in PS7 to replace the boring title text, so at least my corner of the blogosphere looks like "me" now. That's my minstrel guitar in the background on the banner there. ( I painted it myselfs)


I can't help wondering who this blog will ever reach. Maybe if I posted regular updates of artwork or fiction stuff it'd attract an audience of sorts, but I can't help thinking that it's unlikely to reach any further than my immediate friends and family... Who would ever read a blog just because they find someone else's daily life entertaining or of value? Is anybody's daily life really that interesting all the time? There was a movie about a guy who was always on tv and never knew it- Truman Show. Would people really follow something like that?

In this day and age I am led to believe that now more than ever citizens of technologically forward countries believe they have some kind of right to an inside knowledge of the lives of others, or that in some strange way, everyone they know and a lot of people they don't know need to be privy to their every waking thought. Case in point: Twitter. Who the frick wants to know what you ate for lunch, besides perhaps your Mom or your gastrointestinal health specialist? How interesting can the thoughts, opinions and ideas of others truly be?

This of course hinges upon one's view, overall, of one's social peers as a whole. If one tends to feel that 85% of the great american public, for example, are routine fed emotionally-reasoning idiots most of the time, then one is not likely to be all that excited at the prospect of daily intimate knowledge of their thoughts, having decided in judgement that they could not possibly have enough thoughts of worth to contribute to the discussion that is human experience.

If, on the other hand, one takes a more optimistic view of one's peers as a whole, one might be intrigued, from an anthropological, sociological, and simply emotional standpoint to have the opportunity to study human expression across such a wide spectrum as the miracle of social technology provides for us today.
(I am aware that this last was one single sentence. Be grateful I know my punctuation, and bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.)

It may be educational and even a lot of fun to see what someone else is thinking, as they are willing to present it to the world. Sure, their account is spun, but so is a bullet, and the caliber, target, trajectory and rate of spin are awfully revealing as to the make and model of the gun that fired the bullet, if I may extend a metaphor. By including social networking sites as a medium of human expression, one, or I, can come that much closer to understanding these strange creatures that we are.