* Tattoos

My oldest daughter, who ran with the early ‘punk/boarder’ crowd, is now in her 30’s. Like many in her generation, she was and is "into tattoos" and recently told me, again, that they’re her form of self expression, "just like writing is yours, dad." We have had several discussions about tattoos over the years, but she really never "won" one of them, in my 'dad-opinion' of course, until that last observation and correlation was pointed out.

Scary.

Blogging, writing occasional OpEds for the local paper, dropping a comment below an online news item, posts on FaceBook and other social networking places; even just sending emails in a world where every expression of self will live forever, really is electronic tattooing. It's fun, if you're into it, but the net result can't be positive, since one's contributions are fixed in time and people change. And God only know's what's in the ink.

I've been "online" since before the 'Net was browser-capable, thanks to a friend and fellow broadcast engineer who introduced me to early "BBS" systems and the text-based Internet back in the 1980's. Computing itself, at the personal level, was brand new in those days and the ability to network was simply amazing to me then.

The older I get, though, the weirder life becomes.  I'm not sure if all this online stuff is worth a damn anymore.


I feel as if most of what I say, whenever I look at it in a "third-person" viewpoint later, is the ASCII equivalent of "CB Radio," if anyone remembers that affliction-gone-wild of the 1970's.

Blogs - 99% of them, including this one - are long on presumptive opinion and chatter but short on any real reason to exist, beyond providing free data mine resources to the myriad of professionals who troll the 'Net as they package and sell the "trends" to whoever may be looking to buy the aggregate data today.

What do all these social networking posts, blogs and comments under news items add up to?  Layers upon layers of ephemeral fractal eTattoos, used for crowd survey and management.  As detailed by Nicholas Carr in his recent book The Big Switch, it's not the individual privacy issues that are exploited today, it's the loss of "privacy" we humans once had as a crowd that seems remarkable.  Now, all media is virtually interactive and a crowd can be steered with precision, and far more subtly than ever. In aggregate, the data mined from the 'Net has to be a LOT better than polling ever was or can be, since people volunteer all of their opinions freely online, in real time, around the clock.  One doesn't even have to overtly express them. If you have movies in a queue at Netflix, and millions of people do, the data aggregators know. The sums of the world's posts, the comments, the queues and purchases of this and that are the trends, sortable any way one would like.  Trends.  If you're selling to a crowd, or leading a crowd, these trends provide your feedback loop. So much data is aggregated and sold today, it's almost incomprehensible.  No, it is incomprehensible.

What do all the eTattoos add up to right now?  Nothing.  Literally, nothing.  Congressional types stated yesterday that the GOP won't detail a platform for the fall elections, for example, since that might be used for political purposes. A political platform used to be the basis of political purpose.

People don't want to hear about it anymore.

Comments?

Oil production will peak, if it hasn't already. So what? My yammering on about it for years hasn't accomplished a thing, other than to slap another tattoo on my own back. As my father told me when I was 13, they are nothing but "identifying marks." Some tattoos are a lot "better" than others, in that the person who designed and painted them had talent. The same goes for 'blog writing. I place myself in the lower percentile of authors, talent-wise, and make up for this in volume. But the bottom line is - it's all just tattooing.


The fact that awareness of the pending oil supply issue has resulted in a garden out in the yard that's fed me every day for a month?  That's the only good that's come from it.  In total, the damage incurred due to opinions expressed far outweighs the benefits in life, at least in my life.  "What you say can and will be used against you," right?  Yet, here I am again.  As my daughter says, when I've asked her when she'll stop getting tattoos, "You never run out of skin, dad." 

I never enabled reader comments here. I've no real idea who reads this page; if anyone besides you, Ron, and my ex's divorce lawyer's paralegal ever looks at this site, but at least you can't tattoo yourself in this "eParlor."  Nope.  This has been my arm.