Two blogs in one day?

Why not? I haven't written two blogs in one day in a long time.... perhaps never. But hey, I got a lot of free time today, so why not? It's enjoyable on a day off  (yeah I work on Saturdays).

Social media, data, and modeling (kind of essay-ish):
So we have 140 characters in Twitter. A status update on Facebook. A picture on Instagram. I write blogs on Blogspot. Here's the thing, I remember starting my blogspot as a way of chronicling my life as a cohesive unit. Kind of like a real journal. But I never realized this. Looking back on all of my blogs, sure, sometimes there was some semblance of a narrative. But for the most part, it's severely fractured. Which, if you didn't already know, is a very real modern thing. Disjointed events. Vignettes of lives. Our brains naturally try to configure a story that makes sense from all of our "updates". I have reason to think these conjectures aren't very accurate. Consider this: I can post a relatively happy tweet, but can actually be having the worst day of my life. You would never know. It's the stories we sell that create an artificial self. The real kicker is that it may not even be an artificial self that I'm creating by posting a happy tweet in a sad state;  I could still very well be happy that moment and still be living the worst day of my life. What I do is create a second-self. Not a lie, just not the whole truth. A disjointed, second self.

What's more, social media doesn't help that much, either. I'm forced to be brief -- it induces the fractures. It feeds into this modern, fractured way of living. Sure you can try to be cohesive. But it's so much easier to be brief (disguised as "simple"?). Oh I can post this now and explain later. I have to be real-time. Says the pressure to stay up to date. Says the pressure to boast, to show everyone I'm okay right now. Sooner or later, we start liking the convenience of not being a whole. Of course, people should be free to sell whatever self they want on social media. The irony is that sometimes we can't even recognize the self we sell. Until we have to pick up the pieces of ourselves and try to make sense of them. Realizing we can't make any sense of such a fractured mess. We're disjointed wholes, a lot of us are. I've become one, too. The trappings of modern life.

Again, not that any or all of this is bad, per-se. But it sure is confusing sometimes. And whatever story you feed yourself  about yourselves, that's the story that keeps you going. Again though, however, sooner or later, we all have to face ourselves.