I just tossed out about 10 submissions over the past 48 hours. I was looking at my submission list and realized that I hadn't made any in about 3 months or so. A few rejections were trickling in from ones I made back in November/December, so I decided to get a few more out. I'm not really expecting any results just at the moment, but I have to keep things on the cycle. Finding homes for these stories makes me feel like a caseworker in child services.
There was an interesting news item being discussed on NPR the other day (yes, I listen to NPR) about a man who had lost his eye long ago, and had since become a film-maker, and was currently working with technologists to invent an in-eye camera that he could fit where his prosthetic normally would be. In this way, he planned on making a documentary feature. The NPR correspondent asked him the requisite questions about privacy, voyeurism, legality, etc., and he made a rather brilliant point - we are the worst invaders of our own privacy these days. Blogging, twittering, facebook status updating - these things air our private thoughts to an audience, sometimes a context-less anonymous audience. Is this healthy?
As a writer, I think, perhaps, that sharing too many of these inner thoughts without context is not healthy... at least the twitter/facebook 250-words-or-less variety. The temptation with these sites is to update constantly, lighting up every witty or useful thought we have during the day. That sort of mental exposure is unprecedented... and it is difficult for me to see an sensory difference between obsessively updating twitter and publishing pictures of one's own genitalia. Perhaps in society-at-large we are not terribly far removed from a day when that becomes a reasonable activity as well?
Constructing thoughts in the blog format is not terribly unhealthy for those that are scatterbrains and use these things to collect/condense a set of ideas.
Where are we moving as a society, if we take this story into consideration and use it as a fulcrum point? Increased frequency of voluntary body modifications? Voluntary prosthetic work? Digital enhancements? Injecting ourselves more and more into the "web" realm?
We are perhaps moving toward a meta-life. That's the difficult thing about acceleration in society... you can never tell the shape the world will take next in light of the changes. Historical record might indicate that it will not change all that much, but walking a mile in the shoes of people who passed on long before I, or even my parents were born might indicate that within my own lifetime I may cease to recognize the shape of the world around me. Perhaps that is what it feels like to be elderly. Perhaps that is why the aged surround themselves with the familiar and reject the changed.
Will our enhanced ability to adapt and consume, bred into us by living in a time of massive "buy-culture" and "gadget-boom," save us from a similar fate?
