Why bother? Another random post.

In a recent email my father observed that I haven’t updated the site in a while. He has also become the external voice to echo that voice inside me saying “write”; repeating the prod in every correspondence. More importantly, he encourages me to write routinely. So, I’ll dedicate today’s writing to my dad, and promise to update this site on a routine basis.

Searching and re-searching for a purpose

My tag line reads “It’s about Tim”, my attempt at a clever play on words. I would say to myself, “it’s about time you got around to writing” and would find that I tended to write about myself, thus – oh you’re smart enough to get it, I don’t need to explain.

To me writing can too easily be a form of narcissism – of looking at what I write liking staring into a mirror, amused or engaged in some fashion by what I see. I look back through old journals and I see a lot of self-centered writing and really don’t want this site to be that. I don’t want it to be just “about Tim.” Besides, I’ve got a Facebook page for that now. So, I will be playing around as I write, asking myself and anyone reading where I might go with this site. Maybe I will keep some of the autobiographical stuff here, but do a better job along the lines of Elden Nelson, Merlin Mann and Kevin Kelly at writing well enough about other topics that people would actually want to read about me.

In defense of Facebook

I mentioned Facebook earlier. Part of the volunteer work I do for MOUSE is to help them understand Facebook as marketing tool and hopefully a source for micro-donations, so I pay close attention to it. Many see social networking sites as a toy or a distraction. My friend Kevin recently asked me what the fuss was all about. He now has a Facebook account where he does his part to contribute to the enoumous database of random human thought and irrelevant action. My much-missed, former neighbor, Erica, had this to say about Facebook in a post at her site:

But in the grand scope of things it turns out to be a bunch of random comments, pokes, and pictures of all my buddies partying as if they were still in college rather than a narrative, and as Damien pointed out, this blog has been a log of the last few years and I shouldn’t neglect it especially during this huge new chapter of our lives.

That huge new chapter, by the way, is the recent birth of Damien and Erica’s beautiful daughter, Juliet. It is certainly easy to get sucked in and waste time on Facebook, but I think there is more to it than that. Importantly, Erica points out in her post that she has reconnected with people that she hasn’t heard from in 13 years. I made a number of friends in the navy back when very few people had even heard of email. I’ve posted some names on this site before in hopes that they would find me. Facebook has made it so much easier to find these people and for them to find me. I think connections and communication are the key ingredients to life. I see social networking as an enhancement to the Web – it brings us closer together even if much of the information is random. And I would rather passively view a posted joke to someone’s wall than to recieve multiple forwards of the same joke in my email. I like Facebook for what it is.

When I was in my early 20′s I let go of an important piece of arrogance – the idea that any thought I could have would be original. Instead I became impressed with myself when I found I had similar thoughts to someone I admired or respected. I read Kevin Kelly’s Technium, and am able to understand it occasionally. Kelly’s discussion of what is happening in the world and the Web, echos my own thoughts pretty clearly.

Anyway, I believe there’s a lot of noise out there. I don’t want to add to the noise if I can help it, so I am going to spend a bit more time thinking about how to focus this site. Thank you for reading.