You can blog, but you can’t hide
At the risk of getting a bit philosophical, the internet provides us with a more immediate, unvarnished truth than ever before. If you can’t fake it, the only option left is to be genuine.
The entire internet is happening inside my head. In fact, the entire universe is happening inside my head. Each of us experiences life through our senses and our brains recreate their own virtual version of the outside world, within the massive matrix of cells of which they are constructed. There is no outside world. If I become brain dead, the universe vanishes.
For the next few minutes, please try to stay conscious as we explore the implications of the reality of virtual reality.
Since everything I perceive happens inside my head, everything I do in the world emanates from the same inner realm. My projections are reconstructed inside your mind – become a part of you.
In this way, I am completely exposed and at risk of having you deal with what I have put into your brain in whatever way your virtual reality construct wishes.
My authenticity, my motivations, and my values are laid bare for you to respond to and to judge. Pre-web media allowed us to filter and control our communications with slick production and manufactured messages. Now that media happens instantly, we have removed the spin cycle, revealing who we really are.
This is a scary prospect.
All those demons we thought we could conceal from the world could now be made public at any moment. Any one of us could be the subject of the next viral video. Humiliation and shame are just an upload away, as Brian Atene discovered when his Stanley Kubrick audition tape hit the blogosphere or the thousands of other hapless victims of the virtual laughing stock.
I am dreading the day someone uploads some security camera footage of me acting like a complete twit after half a dozen too many tequilas, or some devastatingly embarrassing old video clip from the 80s that I was stupid enough to have made. What have you said or done that could destroy your façade of respectability?
“I am dreading the day someone uploads some security camera footage of me acting like a complete twit after half a dozen too many tequilas”
There are only two things I can do. 1. Prepare me. Accept that for every cheap laugh I have had at someone else’s expense, the other foot may well be shod. 2. Get real.
I can’t hide anymore. I can’t change the past. But I can begin living an authentic life, communicating with honesty and integrity, and respecting my fellow humans.
My motives must be genuine or I will be called out. I must treat all my customers and associates with equally high levels of respect, lest they blog about me. I must keep hyperbole to a minimum. I must not be contrived. In fact, everything that I am responsible for emanating must be done in the full knowledge that it can come back to bite me, as it is starting to do for so many politicians, celebrities, sports stars, and, ever-increasingly, for millions of ordinary people.
The more directly our minds interface with one another, the more we are creating each other’s reality, the more responsible we become to improving that reality.
We must relinquish the repugnant used car salesman, bitch, or control freak who lurks within us all and focus on developing our inner Obama. It’s time for change we can believe in.
