Another reflective post from your “host” leading up to our 1st Anniversary. but “host” is in quotes to indicate that my vision for this site is not so much “my way” as it is “our way” (at least I want it to be that way 😉 ). Several years ago (when I was still engaged over at TEH FACEBOOK), I had an online friend there who inspired me quite a lot — in a sort of changed my life sort of way. She was so convinced in “WE NOT ME” that she tattooed that on one wrist sleeve, and the ubuntu symbol on the other. To this day, I feel her influence on me — even though I kept bugging her with wanting to know more and understand more about her thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams so much that she saw no alternative to my constant bothering than to unfriend me (indeed: even to block me). There are no “hard feelings” involved, it was simply a matter-of-fact solution to my incessantly menacing neediness which simply took up too much of her time.
I learned a lot from that experience, and also from that wonder-woman (which is, I guess, how I continue to see her to this day). Yet maybe she also learned a thing or two from me. For example: she would emphasize how important reading (and also listening) attentively is, and I would emphasize how our shared language exchanges shape the evolution of our future language, the language future generations will inherit, the expressions future generations will be receiving from us, reshaping them yet again — quasi according to a natural law governing the survival of the fittest languages.
So this long-winded preface is perhaps just one of many possible “background” or “historical” antecedents to “how I / we got here”, other explanations go back much further, along different tangents, and quite obviously beyond the scope of what I (and / or we) want here and now.
I want more of “us” to participate. The musically minded among us may immediately be reminded of Peter Gabriel’s “Only Us” (and his entire album “Us”), or perhaps (for the more advanced 😉 ) Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them”. I by no means want to give anyone a “short, sharp shock” — I simply want community engagement. I have been reaching out to “Others” for nearly a year now: many seem astonished, quite a few seem flattered, some seem to feel flustered, but almost no one is clicking “join” (and actually completing the step to become a member of this website).
I want more others to become members, I want more members to participate and become more engaged with unraveling the mystery of both our own individual wants and our collective wants. I want more understanding about how we choose to create the environments we want to live in. I want these and more things to happen, and I also want other things (i.e., wants of others) to happen, too.
I want this increase in engagement to happen here, and I also want it to happen there and everywhere, too. One way of interpreting the web is to see it as one big massive hypertext, with links making connections all over the place.
I wish to close by explaining why I feel people should become engaged more here. Here, I feel we can expect a heightened level of sensitivity to the importance of wants, the awareness of wants and so on. Just the other day I found an article on the web attempting to delineate wants from needs — but in my opinion the author was too conviced of their own ideas, and I also felt the ideas were quite confused / confusing (at best — if you wish to read about it yourself, you may be able to find the text via my review of the author’s “about” page). I had submitted a comment to the post, and it was apparently not approved. I don’t know much about the author, except perhaps that they seem unwilling to engage.
My hopes and aims for this website is that more engaged members will increasingly participate, and thereby help to shape our own future, and perhaps also the future of others. Helping to make this high priority happen is important to me. The path I intend to trailblaze in order to get us from here to there (and everywhere? 😛 ) is the subject for another post … coming soon! 😀
Wants 