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Why Do I Wait? - 1/2/09 When I was in grade school, I would activate screen savers, change wall paper, and tinker with file icons on the home computer. My parents would revel in my creative and investigative contributions to the world, "How did you get a toaster to fly around on the screen? What a gift! Change it back and go clean your room, NOW." Later, I started disabling the primitive security software on my school's lab computers* rectifying my and my fellow classmate's boredom by bringing in sweet computer games like Spectre and Crystal Quest to play in place of Math Blaster. In college, the university gave us some free web-space and I wanted to fool around with html. I created satire pages complete with graphics and in some cases flash animations. My ultimate goal was to investigate the world of web development while generating a couple laughs. The site was growing, I had a consistent fan base and people enjoyed reading my stuff (or, they were just being nice). But, when sophomore year rolled around, I stopped. I realized that online posts and offline introductions were no longer uncorrelated events. My online persona was spilling into my offline existence, affecting not so much existing relationships, but new ones. First impressions were starting to form not by meeting me, but by stumbling across my homepage. Yes, I was uncomfortable with my web-presence, but I was more uncomfortable with just having a web-presence. To have a "presence" meant spending the time to format colors, tables, and position pictures by hand. You'd spend an hour or two concocting your actual content, then the rest of the day formatting it for your website... in short, you had to be a huge dork to have the time and energy to do this. The more content I posted, the more I found myself being sucked into the world of the web... the world of java scripts, action scripts, and style sheets. Did I want to go down this path? I wasn't sure. I had inched out to the end of the diving board and quickly found myself at the end of it with a choice to make: do I jump now, invest the time, and pimp out my site to grow readership or, do I wait? I decided to wait. I took down my page because I realized the costs of having a web-presence outweighed the benefits. I find myself at a similar juncture now. With the rise of the blogspots, the twitters, and the googles, the number of internet services has exploded. I deeply believe in the virtues of transparency and information flow, but I'm hesitant to jump into this world where the divide is greater than ever. If you want to contribute rather than just take, you need an online infrastructure that consists of: a well designed web-site, blog, twitter account, flickr account, and a healthy network of friends and followers, etc. The diving board (if only imaginary) feels significantly higher now. Without the proper "stuff" on your site you scream amateur hour. Additionally, if you have all the stuff, and you are amateur hour, you look like that over-zealous clown at the golf course. You've seen him, the guy who every two weeks is swinging a brand new 800 dollar driver off the tee en route to scoring a cool 130. He looks the part but contributes nothing. At 23, I have very little substantive content to contribute to the conversation. If I jump into the web-world 100% and go for it, I'm that guy. I don't want to be that guy, not yet. "If I understand anything in this life, it is how to wait. It is not an answer. But for me it is everything" -Saddaharu Oh "Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." -Winston Churchill "All the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, which is their inability to sit quietly in a room" -Pascal * The software was called FoolProof and it was terrible. A safe startup on a mac (which at the time was like holding down shift) would disable all the extensions... including FoolProof. |