Alright, here’s the deal: A while back I made a promise to myself that Zythepsary would be the home for “pure unedited thought, art, media, writings”. I promised myself, and you, that I was going to live fully open, unafraid of the judgement that you or the proverbial “they” would make. I promised myself I was going to stop pretending like I’m something other than what I am.
And that’s what I’ve done.
I wasn’t writing about Open Web projects and programs for any reason other than I had something to say, and I’m interested in our cultural shift. Ok, so a couple times it was someone else who asked me to expand on something I said in passing, and thus resulted a particular blog post. But for the majority of my blah blah blahing, I just had something to say.
And thus I have something to say again. In all honesty, I have no clue what I am doing. My brain hurts most of the time. I think about too many different things. I am constantly standing at the crossroads of consciousness and wondering which worthy cause to dedicate my attention to. I have every option, I can be and do anything, anything at all. I also have opinions, too many opinions.
When I say I can do anything, I mean it. Yeah, I have my specialized talents, things I’m interested in, goals that are less fuzzy then others, but my interests, degrees, theories and talents are always shifting, moving, developing, changing.
I’m learning, constantly learning. Learning about education, learning about web culture, learning about culture. I’m learning about how my perceptions have the potential to help other people. I’m learning about making, being, doing, creating, failing, winning and a million other things.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways that the web changes the world. Not just ways that the web can change the world, but how it already has. I think about steps that people are taking everyday to help people adjust to the structural changes that the digital age is and has been bringing. I think about how people are changing too, and I wonder if it’s only my perception adjusting (because I am now “a grown up”).
Inevitably, I decide that it is not my perception, that I am in fact witnessing and participating in a movement. I figure that if my psychological associations to learning, making and doing have been adjusting from what I learned as a child, so have everyone else’s. Web culture, I think, is responsible for more than just the advancement of the web or media competencies, it’s responsible for adjusting perceptions.
The adjustment of perception is the backbone of what it means to learn. I might not have a clue what I’m doing (on the existential level), but my perceptions are constantly adjusting, so I know that whatever it is I’m doing, I’m learning.
Learning does take all shapes and forms. The ease of finding information at the click of a mouse has done a couple of things for me. It has allowed me to seek information whenever I have a whim and been a distraction when I have had deadlines on a job I was struggling to do. I guess the best thing is that it has made continual learning easy to achieve.