So I attempted to take a hiatus from Facebook. It was short lived and now I’m back, but I feel like I had some clarity in the eye of the storm. There really wasn’t any real reason for my chosen exile other than just to see how it felt. Ok, that’s not entirely true.
Lately, I’ve been battling with a certain truth that has made me uneasy. The “FaceSpace” is a tool of good and evil. It’s great to be able to keep in contact with friends and share the full panoply of media with them at nearly the speed of light. In our increasingly fragmented and busy lives, being able to still keep in contact keeps a certain degree of humanity alive and well. However, Facebook is also a tool of great evil in that we commit social taboos with almost total impunity. Example: Normally you wouldn’t stalk someone in real life, yet everyone does it on The Facebook. It’s second nature at this point to “Facebook” someone you don’t know but are “hearing” about. Don’t even get me started on the app that watches your would-be paramore and alerts you when their status changes; but I digress…
The issue I was struggling with was where is the line between sharing and spraying? For those of you who aren’t up on the lingo, spraying is generally talking yourself and your accomplishments up and letting everyone know how rad you are…whether they care or not (generally when they don’t). Recently I’ve become reticent to really talk about anything that I do or am planning for fear of spraying. I like to think I do the things I do for myself, and not so others will think better of me. At the same time though, the things I do are part of me and the people who I am close to benefit from seeing who I am and what I do.
I struggled with the fact that my interest in photography, story telling, etc is all ultimately for an audience. After all, pictures that no one sees are kind of pointless, right? So are all photographers and story tellers narcissists? Probably not. Sharing my experiences with climbing is exactly that. My goal is to entertain, inspire, and educate, in other words have people walk away with something positive. Hopefully that isn’t selfish, at least not in the royal douche kind of way.
So, here we go. I’m back with some clarity and focus. Now I just need the time and patience to work on accomplishing these goals. In a few days I’m off to Wyoming for a climbing trip. Hopefully I can bring back something worth while to share with everyone from that…something aside from how rad Scott and I.
PS, by the way, I’m not sure if you knew this, but we are kind of a big deal… 🙂