inkbluesky

In Norse myths three gods Odin,Vili and Ve ( who were themsleves created by Bor and Bestla who came from Yamir. Odin,Vili and Ve killed Yamir. The blood from Yamir produced a flood that killed all the frost ogres except Bergelmir) created the first man and woman out of two fallen trees, an ash and an elm. Her name was Embla and his was Ask. Odin breathed life into the pair, but they were still not complete creations. Ve gave them sight and hearing, while Vili gave then the gift of intelligence. I haven’t added them all up yet, but I am amazed considering the bounds of geography and time how many creation myths contain incidents of flooding ( water as killer and purifier?) and incidents pertaining to having killed a parent or predecessor.

fallen acorn 

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism 

Today’s online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties—no one who lists thousands of “friends” on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.

…Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers “layouts, graphics, background, and more!” to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.

This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it’s an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, “Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustus’ MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose.” And he wouldn’t be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.

I understand the need to gossip, but I don’t understand the obsessive or at least near obsessive level that need has risen to. As to the expressing one’s individuality to the point where your individuality becomes ironically like everyone elses, while that phenomenon has taken an strange turn on social networking sites the trend itself is not new. A few years ago I was watching a reporter cover a bikers convention. Everyone she interviewed talked about expressing their individuality, their uniqueness yet all the motorcycles were styled in a similar way, they all wore the same style of clothing ( lots of black, denim, chrome studs, cycle boots, etc) and they all expressed themselves using the same lingo. There seems to be some point at which the individual reaches critical mass and becomes a standard adapted by the majority of the community.
Interesting look at individuality from Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street