hystereo

The web would be more interesting if people were willing to undertake real projects for no money. Creative people will waste umpteen hours letting us know what they think about cats or uploading their muesli to Flickr but as soon as the idea of making something real from scratch comes into play suddenly everyone has to have an earning model and salaries. That is probably the fundamental difference between the old and the new Internet.

When I first started out in 2000, I saw the Internet as a way to publish my stories without having to listen to criticism or praise. The Web back then to a 14 year old like me from a country people always thought was a myth was pure bliss. My terrible English was merely pushed aside by many under the assumption that I was foreign and naive. And that I was. It eventually grew to become a huge problem for someone who wanted to learn.

The constant struggle to improve myself became something of an obsession. I started begging for criticism, often over-indulging myself to the point of not having any sleep for days. Web design became a huge thing for me over the years as well; I eventually chose it as a major for my degree. If you’ve been friends with me since 2002, you would have noticed that my sense in design, writing and living life drastically changed after applying it to the Internet. Over the years I had gained mentors, followers, friends and family through it. But how much of that can be evidenced?

The point (or lack thereof) I’m proposing here is that diving into the Web, this nearly apocryphal medium that we seem to devote our entire lives to, can lead to brilliant results given exposure to the proper locality, but the negative connotations that surround it can prove disastrous in regards to substantiating yourself as a person.

What I’m saying about publishing works by creatives is that it all boils down to how much the person is willing to whore him or herself to the vast number of people that belong to this community. I definitely see Tumblr as a good place for steering people in that direction, but given the service’s reputation as a compromise between a blogging platform and a linking application, how is it going to help distinguish you as a professional in your field, considering how much more popular the Internet has become? Maybe writing this up is because of my selfish nature. Everything has to be mine mine mine! But the cynic in me thinks that everyone else is selfish too. I do agree with distorte on one thing though: Tumblr gets extremely boring. I’m basically contradicting myself here, but it’s a good thing I wrote about how much of a slut I was back then, right?

Fuck it. Let’s do more magazines. Let’s do more collaborations. Let’s all pour ideas into one slimy melting pot and see how it goes from there. How long will it last before it gets boring, though?