written April 1st, 2009 · 0 comments

I am torn between wanting to get more active and involved with things like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc. and just going on with my work and life without trying so hard to connect with people. I want more people to see my website (my design work) and I want to generate interest in this blog of mine . . . but it isn’t THAT important that I have tons of followers or subscribers. In short, I am not doing this for social connections, (however, collaborations would be cool). It is more about having an outlet for my thoughts. Is this the case for everyone? Is this why blogs are so popular? Are there those that write blogs and those that read them? Or does it overlap? I find it hard to do both. How does one find the time!

The truth is, I have just enough time in one day to complete the following: think my own thoughts, listen to and analyze my thoughts, do my design work, follow current events, occasionally update my blog, exercise, make dinner, enjoy some downtime with my boyfriend and go to sleep! And I don’t even have a full time job right now!

I wonder if I am somehow just not able to multitask as well as others do, or is it that I don’t want to spend so much time on the web? I believe I am simply torn between two worlds! One is online and the other is the reality I see outside my window everyday. Which world makes me the most content? There is so much information online today. What I could learn on Twitter in one day, I would never find just browsing the web as I do now. How could my life be different if I had more contacts that fed me random information all day long? BUT, that takes so much time away from the most important things in my life, like my thought process and how I make sense of the world, and my design work, that could someday affect the world I live in, if I become successful.

This need to connect . . . it is an interesting idea in our rapidly growing world. Is our ability and our will to connect natural?  An interesting essay on this subject, written by Matt Harding, who’s video Dancing most of us have all seen and loved, had this to say for This I Believe (on NPR),

‘I believe my children will have brains ever so slightly better suited to the vast complexity that surrounds us. They will be more curious, more eager to absorb and to connect.’

So should I just succumb to the fact that my brain cannot handle so much complexity? What to do, what to do. My blog entry about Jonah Lehrer is about a similar thread, how our brains make decisions.

Maybe the key is to collaborate? Work with people who can connect to that other world better that I can, since I most definitely exist most happily in this earthly world? For the time being, it’s just me, in my own little world as I see and understand it. I will attempt to connect to the rest of the world, as I so obviously yearn to do, trying my hand at Twitter and the like. Who knows if it’ll be a success.