I do more with this page than meets the eye. Case-in-point: this is the nine-hundredth article spread across about ten (give or take) blog and content sites to be found in the depths of this domain. It just goes to show that I’ve been moving far too fast for my own good. I even worked through lunch today; though I did sneak out early to peek at the progress of our new living space just a twenty-minute drive away.

Consequently, the RoundUp was in mid-broadcast, and I was surrounded by audio version of a sociology lesson:

Around three-thirty this afternoon, just when the audience who needed to hear it most was busy working, the CBC conducted an insightful reflection on the general speed of the world. I can give neither the broadcasters nor the host credit for originality as it been extracted, the bulk of the context, from a guest reviewer’s opinion of a magazine article, the article itself republished from an alternative media source. Initially, I thought all that filtering would make it less valid; But no. The filtering and amplification, like so many published memes passed around some secret network (until it wound up in my ears from the speaker of my little red truck) really only makes it more potent.

My inner-most muse was very impressed. He’s a sit-back-and-smell-the-roses type of character, and I’ve been ignoring him far too much lately.

It seems, or so the article would try and impress upon us, that the world is moving too fast. Cell phones connecting us to previously untapped social and professional networks wherever we are and whenever we want, syndicated television on two-hundred channels entertaining us with the dogma of Hollywood, and the bulk of human knowledge available twenty-four hours a day to anyone with the means to buy a moderately priced computer and a high-speed Internet connection. What the article and subsequent broadcast meant to tell us is (really) that we are moving too fast in the world.

I reflected momentarily, and went back to driving down a busy road. Later I found myself sitting in front of two screens, one a television playing reruns of Seinfeld, and the other a LCD monitor checking my email and catching up on the latest news from the under-belly of technology.

This time the muse, most definitely, was not impressed. My life, after all, moves far too fast. That would be fine if I could keep up. But much of the time I’m sitting on the edge watching it all slip through my fingers and wondering why I can’t seem to find the motivation to tap out a few words on the keyboard or etch out a few lines on a clean sheet of paper, gritty charcoal in my hands.

Step one step backwards.

It’s not my objective to preach. Nor is it my objective to state abundantly obvious clich�s of the nature of society in general. It’s my objective to create yet another node in this, the meme-engine. The world is moving too fast. And thus this one idea re-propogates. I state it, and it enters your brain (albeit temporarily) and perhaps one day you’ll share that notion somewhere else. Barring that, you’ll become a end-node in the network and you may not even matter to the grand scheme of things anyhow.

It’s about choice, information, and how we use it to our advantage.

I’ve been trying to recalculate something about this webspace. Doing so has made me notably absent, one may have also realized, until those unremarkable though vast bursts of creative energy are sporadically dumped into these pages. It is symtomatic of something else, and even if I tried to explain it, it would be the metaphorical tip of the iceberg to the grand scope of it all. Even Jess was reflecting on a lack of general motivation lately. I won’t try to steal her thunder, nor try to arrogantly presume that I had anything directly to do with it — but it does beg the question: in a universe created by the bursting interaction of ideas by like-minded individuals, how many nodes can collapse on that network before the engine folds in upon itself?

I am just a node after all. And not a particularly vital one at that. That’s not pitiful self-doubt writing. It’s just a quantitative fact of how many people load this page on a regular basis.

So, do we stop the world? No. The momentum would fling us all into outer space. Whatever. Then, without dropping dead of virtual exhaustion, how do I as a person sitting here with a computer on my lap make my little node vital?

I realize it isn’t the question of stopping the world. It’s a question of grokking the nature of the information, learning what is important and what is not, and filtering the filters: meta, as it were. I see you, I understand you, and I fall back to quietly leach off that energy. You presume that this is a parasitic relationship, and that by reading you’ve done your part. I understand it to be symbiotic. I guess it starts there: I write another nine-hundred pages of rambling giberish, contribute to the digital swath of information, and narrow those filters just a little more.

You? Well, that’s really not my decision.