w0rd.ca

I decided to take a hiatus from spending so much time using electronic means of communication at the end of September. My brother scoffed at me when I deactivated Facebook, and some people thought it was a tad off to just leave it for a temporary period of time, but I picked up quite a few relevant messages along my two-week stint away. It’s because I found myself floundering in a sea of irrelevance. A distraction all too reminiscent of the bewilderment and utter chaos that can clog a budding mind from the richness and importance of real, tangible interaction with the world, things that can be easily lost in such a quagmire.

I returned to a place that had me relishing in the virtuous trappings of the real and intimate, the fresh and ephemeral, the quiet and the loud, the softs and the stubborns, the dreary and the blossom of the outdoors, and the feel of another human being beaming with joy or tearing with the sadness that catches your breath when you can hear it in their trembling voice. It’s almost sad how much I had missed instances like that, and believe it or not, I’m almost certain that it’s because I was too busy worrying about bullshit on the Internet and not the tangible beauty of my everyday.

As if I’m picking up the long abandoned rotten log to beat the dusty remnants of the dead horse on the subject, Facebook seems to be everything. Well, at least to some people. Sometimes I would take it as seriously as some of the people I’ve turned a fussy eye towards, so at least I can admit that misgiving, but over the summer I came to a sobering realization that Facebook has come to solidify itself as a permanent and all too meaningful part of the way in which we as human beings carry out our social interactions. An offhand comment here, or an out of context ‘like’ there, can send your friends fleeing from you as a person like booty-laden bandits from a bank alarm. Some folks can get up in a huff over the way you portray them in a tagged photo, others will take great offense to a deletion of friendship, or even use the social network as a way to discredit, mar and psychologically ‘get’ to someone. It’s not for me, and I hope some people can relate, I think they can.

I know that there’s an incredible benefit to this website; I can keep in touch with friends that live in far off bustling cities, take pride in my colleagues photography and creativity, and always look to my news feed to learn something new everyday, as a well of information, inventiveness and soulful textual banter crosses my screen. But for the most part, its drivel, and it takes me further and further away from a place that I have come to hold quite sacred for the past few weeks. Good old-fashioned reality.

Everyone I spoke to at school in recent weeks seemed to have much more to say to me when I spoke to them. I seemed to have a great deal more to say in return. It’s like the blur and white noise from Facebook had numbed my sense of what it was like to converse with other human beings, face to face. When I would reach for a sip from my pint glass at the pub, everything would slow down. My ear would prick up and catch more intonations of the delight of conversation and laughter around me. When I drove to work or school, I would see houses, trees, hills and valleys that I hadn’t noticed before. It made my time on campus more explorative, interested and filled with a sense of agency and a drive to get more tasks completed. I would find myself looking around more unseen corners and make more room for taking film photographs of the interests and compositions that were rendered all the more vibrant by a lack of mental bullshit, as it were.

Here lies another interesting item of discussion. I borrowed a film camera from my friend Katie a few weeks ago, and I’ve been taking exposures around my hometown in Dundas, at school in Guelph and where ever I seem to find good subject matter and good friends or family to keep closed inside my roll of color film. It seems to me, the fact that each exposure is hidden from my scrupulous eye until it gets developed, injects all the more value, delicate touch, metering, composition, and time spent on simply finding a great shot. Noting the light that spreads across a grove of birch trees, the look in someone’s eye as they stare back at you before you shoot their familiar face, or the sense of being in the right place at the right time, when the light and composition are just fucking perfect. Little, insignificant moments and building blocks of my everyday were all the more enhanced as I re-examined them for a possible burn onto the negatives inside the camera, as opposed to taking a bulk of simple exposures from my digital SLR and instantly knowing what I’d done, or not in most cases, with the exposure. It’s the real that makes it so much more important, and enjoyable.

I think what I seem to have discovered, is that I was ignoring some fundamentally important things that make me happy. More insight, more attention to just about everything, sound, touch, sight and how everything can fit together in a friendship, a rivalry, a new birth or a long over due passing of someone important. You can’t get these things from Facebook. I learned to cut away from it a lot more readily. I seem to have been able to log off and stay off for a couple of days and not have a care for what I might be missing. If someone wants to speak to me, they can find my number and call. If someone is having a party, I’ll find out and make my way like we always did a few short years ago. And if something really happens, something that is worth my time and attention, I’ll see it, know about it, and it will make me all the more who I am, without seeing it or hearing about it passively and silently, sluggishly scrolling past it on my computer screen.

So friends, maybe take solace in what I’ve said, or simply disagree. But the core of the message here is that I think there is a great deal of merit in taking time to move back to a place where the reality and tangible interactions that we seem to have lost in recent years are more abundant and commonplace. Because there is nothing worse than feeling uptight, undone and in a fuss about a world that only half exists, and can cause the all-important human soul to become burned out and perhaps a few shades darker than its bright and shiny likeness to the sun.