By Mike Habegger
What have I been thinking about this summer? Hmm, too much, much too much. I am much too much for this world to take. Watch in fear as I destroy it.
I am beginning to amass and digest the right kinds of information and philosophies to undertake my life’s work—the remaking of our society. How do we establish community again in America? How do we restore power to the people without making it look like that is the goal? How do we move into an environmentally conscious era? How do we end fanaticism? And How do we move past the status quo? How?
This website, nothing more than a place where people can read about the happenings at McDaniel College from an unbiased source, is part of my project. It is a first attempt to establish a small grassroots online community composed of members of a small community. It is a “place” that reflects and parallels what I have found to be the empowering and comforting atmosphere of McDaniel College, where no one is left to be lost in the shuffle.
This is not facebook, MySpace, Xanga, or even Current TV. There are not millions of users competing for the attention of whoever happens to be viewing a page at any given time. There are no hypernerds out there to pick up the slack for your lack of participation. And unlike YouTube, though not unlike Wikipedia, this is not an orgy of low grade videos, photos, and ideas. And because of its small size, the participants in this community will have to be accountable to each other in the online reality simulation as well as real life.
We see each other every day. This web community is formulated so that a person’s internet-based, largely user-created identity will begin to merge with that same person’s real world, largely other-created identity. Who you are in fonts and photos on a screen cannot and will not be held separately. The medium in which your identity is formulated shouldn’t matter. You are you, and you shan’t be ashamed of it.
This website is an attempt to make people care again. I won’t be making any reassurances about how great our world is right now. But I also won’t be content with assurances that the world sucks either. How do we get people to care about things again? By making the happy world of the simulated internet reality the same as the empirical “real world” reality. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe f*** yourself.*
I want to do this because I believe in it. I believe in the small, close-knit, liberal arts community. I believe in people—that they want a better world, knowing that this one is insufficient. Too many in our generation are content to sit idle in front of their TVs, allowing someone else (usually corporate America) do all the work of constructing culture. Too many have sat idly by as power has been whisked away from the hands of the people and but into the hands of the corporate aristocracy (this is perhaps due to our young age—it is not our fault entirely, thanks Mom and Dad).
I am going to idle. That would be a waste of gas anyway, and electricity if I were idle on AIM (people—please “sleep” your computers when you sleep).
*This is not meant as offense, this is from our favorite movie of 2006, The Departed. Please note that anecdotes and outbursts like this will be prevalent in future postings.