Of mediums and messages

"The medium is the message", said Marshall McLuhan. I didn't always agree with that. But I think I understand it better now. Nowadays, many of us use multiple platforms – face-to-face, instagram, facebook, blogs, phone calls. While some spam every message on every medium, others choose what messages to place on which medium. 

The writing changes at times, because we write for our audience. Even if it is just an audience of one. Like my mom, for instance. When I message her, there are no "lols" and "btws", because it would probably take longer for her to process them. So I write proper, for her.

I appreciate some doses of inspiration. But I admit, sometimes it gets tiring to keep seeing the same posts over and over again. Then it stops. And a month later, those posts pop up again when someone rediscovers them. (Still, good job with sharing the love, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, viralnova and more.)

We are not so much creators of content, as curators of content. It's so important to learn to organise, because there is so much information out there, trying to make its way to us. We have to make sense of it all, not let it overwhelm us, and pick out what we really want/need.

In my case, not everything I instagram goes on facebook. Instagram is for a tighter knit of friends, and feels less spam-ish. I am conscious about not placing every bit of my life online, because one, I don't want to share that much, and two, I don't think people want to always know that much. 

These days, I keep seeing the same posts being forwarded on Facebook. It's either that I have the same type of friends mostly (that they all like the same things), or the whole six degrees of separation thing, hence these things get passed around in the same circles. 

---

Okay, that was just a bit of a mish mash of thoughts on media. 

In other words, while I'm still looking for a full-time job and have quite some time on my hands, I'm back up with Coursera. This online learning is excellent stuff and I'm onto my fourth course now. 

Also, I am loving my new pen nibs – playing with the thickness of the strokes – and the blackness of this indian ink. Black black. 

I must be diligent in making calligraphy an actual skill, rather than just playing around with it a little and then not trying anymore. So for a start, I've been practicing strokes:

^ Can you tell what font I was copying? ^