perfect men

i’m having an i-crisis. i haven’t defined myself, yet. i’m not sure who i should to be. if i don’t blog, can i have an i-story?

nano seconds ago, if you didn’t have an email ID you didn’t really exist. much like the ubiquitous credit card denied your existence in the days of yore. today, at least for now, a defining fashion identity accessory is your blog. it’s a part of your personal software DNA. it’s about who we are; who we choose to be; and how we want to tell an i-story.

not that the i-world is anything new. but lately, it seems to have very successfully crept up upon us. we got mugged by a consumer product company. i have no problem with that. they appear to be doing a pretty good job at all things prefixed with “i”. i have an i-pod; i just bought a macbook pro; i salivate at the thought of an i-phone; and i’m enthralled by the idea that we might be in the midst of an i-revolution. i might even be cool. is this the big idea that we’ve all been waiting for?

in previous, more pedestrian times, scientific revolutions and change were quite the rage. there were loads of big ideas. really, really big ideas. and there seemed to be no end to new ideas. there were paradigmatic shifts and always new products to arouse and exhilarate. the wheel was invented once, and therefore the adage: why reinvent the wheel? why indeed!

the i-world, as far as i can ascertain, finds its modern roots in 17th century european rationalism; a world inhabited by such characters as rené descartes. yes, the very same of cogito ergo sum fame. as both philosopher and mathematician, he was a truly a renaissance guy whose work, it could be argued, influenced the field of artificial intelligence and far beyond. for someone to come up with a line like, i think; therefore i am, that’s rockstar icon level, a marketers dream and a passport to certain wealth. talk about being born in the wrong era!

fast forward 300 years and along came a whole host of other over-achievers who dropped out of school and became billionaires. it was steve jobs who once said, i want to put a ding in the universe, perhaps taking inspiration from rené, who said, everything is self evident.

no one really knows how many blogs are out there; who writes them; why they are written; how many people actually really read them; whether they are temporary or temporal; and if they’re genuinely contributing to our already overloaded body of knowledge and information?

so, my point really is, to get out of this malaise, i need to find the courage and blog. open myself to ridicule and derision. impose a viewpoint on people that don’t really care what i think. add to the mounting volume of i-perspectives, safe in the knowledge that i have written for posterity. or, more simplistically, to be able to assert: i blog, therefore i exist.

perfect men, descartes once said, like perfect numbers are very rare.