After much lurking and indecision, I have unceremoniously joined the ranks of web 2.0 junkies and started a blog. Ironically enough, it was my need to procrastinate from banal course work that finally spurred me to make this oft-considered move. Inertia beget action, if you will.
As of yet, this blog has no particular mandate. I suspect it will center around on some of my many interests:
1. Current events. Politics. Economics.
2. Technology. the Internet. Networks.
3. Social entrepreneurship. Innovation.
I would not be surprised if this blog also doubled as a photoblog, travelblog, personal calendar, digital file-drawer, book/movie/music review site or any other self-serving purpose that comes to mind. Mainly, I just want an opportunity to write (before I forget how) and a place to collect the random assortment of thoughts and observations that I usually force onto my friends and family. Perhaps, a theme might even emerge in the future.
Before I end this post, I should credit this blog’s name, Thumbspeak, to a New Yorker article by Louis Menand. The article centers around the new digital language that has evolved from cellphone texting (BRB, LOL, GR8 etc). You will see none of that on this blog. I do, however, think this concept is a telling illustration of how technology has fundamentally and undeniably changed the way we communicate and interact. Even language, long held to be the bastion of the literary, has not managed to escape unscathed. [For an interesting treatise on the importance of language, see Steven Pinker's Stuff of Thought- or see his Ted Talk here]. At its heart, thumbspeak underscores two other phenomena brought upon man by modern technology: 1. the need to feel constantly connected and 2. the sense of immediacy/urgency that this connective-ness creates (no time to delay- reply to that email on your blackberry NOW). Both have contributed to the ongoing internal struggle between my fascination, but also distaste for technology and the internet.
Anyways, I thought the term was catchy, albeit probably unrepresentative of the tone of this blog. That seems long enough for a first post.
