Chasing our tails

Going around like a comet.
Running over the same old ground
I’m close to the sun for a while before gravity sling shots me back into space.
What have we found?
Fucking gravity. It always wins.
The same old fears

It’s not that I don’t love the internet. And it’s not that I feel like I’m wasting my time on it. I just feel like I’m burnt out on it.

I haven’t been good at a lot of things, but I have normally been good at the internet, even when I’m sucking at everything else.

This week I’m running on no sleep, far too much wine and way too many emotions.

When IRL was getting me down, I turned to the internet. Where I can (sometimes) be funny and charming and shit. But I tried too hard, the jokes fell flat and my grammar and spelling had gone to hell. My brain wasn’t working and I started to feel even worse. I figured looking to the internet for a sense of accomplishment and validation was pretty unhealthy.

So, I am going to step back from the internet for a while and stop trying so hard.

But I love you guys and I’ll see you again soon.

I hated her for saying it. I hated me for her needing to say it.
I covered so much distance but I haven’t really gone very far.

And the silence, it became so very clear
That you had long ago disappeared
And I cursed myself for being surprised
That this didn’t play like it did in my mind

“’cause I’ve still got miles to go”

Anyway, I hope that once I finish this assignment, I can sleep.

Marc Webb: he makes the best music videos

None of you have done anything to deserve such punishment and so I feel I should give you fair warning to remove this blog from your RSS Reader of choice.

I am a pretty rational person. I have been an annoying over achiever all my life and this does tend to isolate you a little bit. Being a precocious little cunt also doesn’t help there.

I’m a musician too. So all together I am a dangerous package of emo.

A song.

Here is my first (and hopefully not last post) over there.

http://www.groupthink.com.au/2010/04/19/i-agree/

KevinRuddPM and his wife were understandably stoked.

But soon after Tweeting this good news to the world, tweets like this one began to emerge:

A quick search on Twitter for the term @KevinRuddPM, will show you that this was not the only such tweet.

Being a strong supporter of Gay Marriage, as I am, I retweeted this without much thought. I believe that all people deserve the right to be married to the ones that they love if they so choose. The happiness that our PM felt for his son getting married should not be exclusive only to parents of straight children.

Soon after, #SocialMeadiaExpert and “self-facilitating media node”, @s_bridges tweeted this:

This tweet made me step back and question what was happening. Is it right to use the engagement of the Prime Minister’s son to make a political point?

My gut feeling (after being forced to check myself) was no. The private lives of politicians should remain private and public discourse like this only serves to degrade the political debate to cheap personal swipes. He was tweeting as a proud father, and in using it to make a political point seems to be a low blow.

However, on a day like today, when he is celebrating the engagement of his son, Kevin Rudd who has previously stated his opposition to changes in law to allow for same-sex marriage, may be in a sympathetic mood to appeals that play on the emotion and excitement he is feeling. As long as it’s not done with malice (I will be honest and say that most of the tweets did walk the line here), I think there could be quite a legitimate cause for using Rudd’s announcement to make your case. After all, he himself has made this information publicly available (on a social media platform where comment is to be expected).

Obviously this is an emotive issue for all involved. In fact, in many ways the gay marriage issue is based on little more than emotion. An emotion (and I feel irrational) view that a same sex marriage is threatening to your heterosexual one. An emotional view on homosexuality itself. I like to think that I am on the rational side of this debate. Is using a highly emotive appeal to our PM (and by extension and parent who has felt the excitement he is feeling) an effective persuasive tactic and use of rhetoric? Or is invoking such tactics on what should (rightly so) be a happy day for our PM just vicious and ultimately undermining our cause?

Without going into too much detail, I was referencing a work by Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities which talked about the role of communication and communication technology’s roll in nation building.

It discusses ideas of communities being imagined by the communication of the day. That media doesn’t just communicate the community but is very much a part of the community itself. It expands on the very obvious but often overlooked concept that there would be no community without communication. It also discusses elements of Nationalism.

Quite an interesting, if not dry and acedemic read.

But anyway, being written in 1991, it was pre web 2.0, but how well do you think ideas of Nationalism work on the Internet as an ‘Imagined Comunity’

Examples I can think of are well read blogs such as Andrew Bolt’s or the much missed Grod Corp where communities form around URLs. Am I right to draw parallels to nationalsim in this instance?

This is a blog full of questions, because I really do want your ideas more than anything.