"Open up the door.
Love is at the core
Open up the door to another shore."
Instead of just posting this song, I am posting the collaborative song and AMV made by Jeesh https://soundcloud.com/jeesh, Pogo http://pogomix.net/ and Klarisse de Guzman https://twitter.com/Klarissedguzman .
I have reasons for limiting the number of things I reblog and like. This work of art inspired the development of those reasons. Now that Pogo has disconnected himself from social-media, I feel compelled to firmly etch my vague feelings into words to better know myself.
Social interaction between humans is an experience I deeply enjoy in a very particular form: A Mutual Exchange of Value.
"Value" is the contrived way we measure existence to relate to us. It is the sum of information that we generate, evaluate and share to describe our lives and what it means to us to experience them while among many other, differently persuaded, life livers. Social exchange of that value validates the consideration of value at all. How we are experiencing our world means very little to us unless it somehow connects us to it. And humans can draw closer to their world by widening their understanding of it. A parallax formed by two humans sharing their different points of observation gives both of them a sense of depth and distance between themselves and the world they are mutually observing.
When I come to you with my words and you reply to me with your own, we have given value to each other by widening our abstract perceptions of what the universe appears to be. Each point of view, whether complimentary or contradictory, adds complexity and depth to an individual's idea of life, the universe and everything. The more we exchange, the more we feel we know. And exchange encourages further exchange by identifying shadowed and weak areas of a position when examined with other evidence in mind.
Exchanges of information in any form have merit in these ways. People can call oration an artform and artwork as a form of speech. All information that we push into the world bares information of its conception and transit through our custom-wired wetware wonderland. We mark it as long as we react to it. And the only way I see Social interaction as valid is in those marks we each can leave.
So I didn't understand Facebook when it started up a fad in middle school. I wondered why anyone wanted "less" chance to be expressive by talking only in the digital world or with preselected emotions from a standardized list. I didn't get it, and I didn't do it. Same for every site until Tumblr. Tumblr was amazing because it was a Blog site to me. A blog site that let you literally jump into a sea of original expression and content and lets you respond to it, generating more content.
Tumblr sites that I RSS'd impressed me greatly by the works of art and intellect that persons combined into the generous but concise personal experience of a Blog. I skipped posts that merely reblogged content without adding something to it. I skipped posts that tried to swell followers with gimmicks or gifts. I got a tumblr site and wanted to join in, so I tried to follow the crowd and make a space for myself inside it.
That's when I realized that after following about six people, it doesn't matter anymore who we follow, as the dash will typically fill and move on after an hour or two. Trying to follow a dialogue of reblog-added content is nearly impossible in the larger and most interesting posts because of that tree-less backwards listing of notes (even on our own posts). And our actual dialogue with each other is infrequently of any extensive depth, even by digital standards.
This seemingly facebook-level limitation to our Mutual Exchange of Value bummed me out on tumblr for ages. But then I watched, listened, experienced this piece of art and followed the story of Pogo through his media-misadventures as a self-respecting artist. And I got it. I understood what tumblr really was good for. [Play video again here]
It's not a place where we banter (not as effectively as IRC) or critique one-another for our materials. The lack of public comments cuts off the world's judgements from our personal experience of blog content. It's a place where we are encouraged and enabled to generate as much personal valuable content as possible and then consume as much of other people's content as possible. Our blogs are where we can express ourselves in an enormous myriad of forms and then automatically share those works with absolutely the entire world. And that sharing is done without the confusions of doubt and fear in the selection of who to share ourselves with. It's everyone. Anyone can find us now. No matter how far we and our lives lie away from the cultural standards, we can be found here. And those looking for us and our values (or even before knowing how much they could gain from some of us) can discover us like a trillion dim stars hiding inside their birth-sign. We were once too dim and our light-beams were too narrow to detect. But tumblr is the Hubble of every person using it to find us. And it amplifies their light to us in turn.
I adore this Infinity Stage, where I've discovered a hundred astonishing stars that invigorate my awe of my human life. And I do speak and create myself out of respect for you, that you might see or receive something from me to bring you something that sparks another expansion of your stellar erupting glow.
So I won't reblog unless I think I could say or show an aspect of your content better than you did. Because rest-assured, I might just have seen your post. And if I have, I have already received your genius with gladdened heart and expanded my mind with it.