Finished Exams? What a strange feeling...

Social mutterings? After a week of study, 10 days of exam block and the last mad dash of both Calculus and Indonesian in one day. My mind isn't up to its normal analytical framework. Its funny that I never the less find myself drawn here... I should have warned myself before I started anything that blogging would be addictive, particularly to my own personality. One of those highly strung, easily stressed personalities which lends itself to addiction of all kinds, that's me! I suppose its lucky I grew up the way I did with education and Church as valued parts of the week rather than falling victim to more negative forms of addiction early in life.

I bring up addiction partly because of the brand new blogging habit I seem to have developed. More of a Journal 2.0 that allows me to type rather that scribble though isn't it? But partly because of the varied array of minor addictions I managed to concoct throughout my study time. I am willing to admit to watching 2 seasons of a

anime cartoon I was a fan of... more than 6 years ago! and playing a gameboy emulator for many hours of the old classic 'Pokemon'. Both are things I was into before I was a teenager and swore never to repeat.

Yet I found myself at a time when I should have studying my arse off - something I was not to discover until the panick attack of Physics part of the way through exam block I could not study. There were points where every inch of my consciousness wanted study and yet I couldn't break the hypotic lure of the TV shows and computer games. More than that the breaking of one addiction would simply encourage a different one. I managed to convince myself not to watch for a couple hours... and I find myself staring and the never changing Facebook screen.

The marvelous thing of Facebook addiction - millions of people addicted to sitting WAITING for somebody else to do something so they can maybe/maybe not comment on it. Even knowing I'm one of the number I'm not quite sure what the mystical lure of the never changing wall is. I do know you are willing to claim 'Friend' of people you NEVER liked simply to have something to display at more frequent intervals. I think I have done more pointless quizzes on there than I have constructive conversations with people in the last few weeks.

Exam period has the ability to isolate a person. No easy task considering I live, work and more often than not play with 39 other people. More specifically my hall way of 4. However with one girl spending much of her time with her boyfriend rather than in her own room and the others being engineering students who finished exams early and got the hell away from this place... It has been pretty lonely around here for a view days. Plus I've been attempting to do all the study I DIDN'T do in the study week. So I haven't left this filthy study cave - which isn't actually that filthy - my bed is made and my floor is vacumned - its more just of a mental filthiness.

Its going to be good to get out and do something tomorrow. No more exams hanging over my head... Maybe after a good night of sleep my brain might start to register the fact it doesn't have anything to stress about. Though being the stress orientated person I am it'll probably find something. The real question is what to do with myself?

Well for the rest of the week whatever I'm told to do... I'm not sure if it is an advantage or disadvantage to this doing of university boarding school style? Much in the theme of the last weeks of school term in primary school we are resorting to playing sports and watching movies (with pointless questions to answer) - tomorrow at least. However on Saturday morning.... bright and early I'll be flying my way back to the great state of Queensland. For those of you who'd understand, Queensland has generally more friendly winter weather than the rather unglorious inland hole that is Canberra. Though I've heard it has been unfashionably cold in Queensland... but still I've done Disney On Ice impressions on the frost around here already... So 5 degrees at night wont be nearly so bad. It'll be normal!

Well as always I have amazed even myself at my ability to babble about things that only I care even the slightest bit about :). However nows about a good time for me to be getting my stuff together and heading to bed. To the majority of the.. of the world I guess... nine thirty is an insane time to contemplate sleep. I know for a fact my american friends stay up to 2, 3, 4 in the morning consistently. I don't know any of my australian friends who would match that... Or at least not without alcohol somewhere in the equation. However 10 o'clock is a good time for going to bed when you start you day every day at 6... So must be heading to that delightful thing across the room and sleeping away the residual exam stress... Yipee!

The Day the Laughter Died... lol

I'm not sure... I can't be because of the delightful space fillers of modern internet speak which have ingrained themselves into my most intimate of thought patterns... But were people more likely to laugh or to cry in past decades than they are today? The ever increasing dependency upon technological forms of written exchange... be it SMS, email, MSN or similar has created a whole additional spectra to our written language. The world recognising that these new forms of communication are leading to some very significant changes in the English language. In the not to distant future it wont be remembering to dot i's and cross t's but remembering to capitalise I (the personal pronoun) and spell wat, I mean wHat, with a wh. However it goes far deeper than that.

SMS language is seen to be characterised by the shortening of words or the exclusion of the obvious connectors or prepositions. That is one part of it... the fitting of the most information in the least number of characters is essential at 160 to the text. However a whole additional aspect of the language is the expression of emotion. Humans for thousands of years has used facial expressions and body language to add even more information than the spoken word was capable. Now it seems there is a need to get around that; people bridging the final hurdle in attempt to make the internet communication seem more like true conversation than an exchange of written word.

This leads into the creation of a whole stew of acronyms... the lols, rofls, :(, :)... and so forth of conversation exchanges. It may seem odd that I through in the non-word typed expressions widely recognised as emoticons when I've stated clearly I'm talking about language. Emoticons were created to graphically represent facial expression in text based symbols. They have more in common with the emotion acronyms than the acronyms have with other shortened words. The acronyms have a more lengthy expression but essential represent some emotion condition of the person using it.

The most well known and probably most frequently used emotional acronym in my own experience is probably 'lol'. Most people will be able to tell you that this modern day acronym stand for 'laugh out loud'... I have heard older references of it, one I know is in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (where a letter is written to include quite a bit of modern acronym language), as 'lots of love' but that seems to have died out with the expanding use of the language. There are a number of jokes or quirky one-liners out in today's world about the insinuations of the acronym 'lol' and how people who use it are probably not actually laughing out loud? Probably a typical reply to such a remark would be lol.

Lol... To my I read it and say each of the letters individual 'l.o.l.' but to many it is actually read as a word in its own right lol... Which i must admit is what it has become. Lol, from personal experience only, is used where something is considered to be mildly amusing to a person. A number of other expressions escalate from there such as rolf, lmao. Possibly depending on a person the emoticon :) sits beneath the lol on the scale of one's expressed mirth. However is its acronym 'laugh out loud' applicable? People would be highly unlikely to have laughed outright and to respond with a simple lol right? Well you can't be sure... How about this question though, they aren't laughing now, but if they didn't know to say/think 'lol' how would that have responded to the stimulas (whatever it was)?

That is a point I think is of significance when looking at this whole new world language, emotion speak. People today have a whole host of emotive laguage at their disposal and quite instinctively just like they do with the rest of their language they use it to catergories and analyse. The language adds a whole host of purely emotive meanings enabling them to label the feeling they feel upon hearing a corny joke for the 50th time as easily as looking at a table and thinking 'table'. There is no getting around the thought process it is subconscious even before a person realises they are doing it. There is also no way of going backwards, no way of looking at a tree blankly and wondering what you would call that... its a tree!

I wonder if by giving people these new words we aren't being striped of some of the more simplistic responces to amusement. I doubt laughter will ever be banished or anything as drastic as that but do people laugh as often, as easily, as openly, as they used to? Or has terms like lol and the need to express it in a written form removed some of the instinctive responce to humour or sadness or fury from the everyday person? I'm not sure whether this new language is making people any better at expressing their emotions... or worse.

I am one of the thousands probably millions of people who find lol crops up in their internal thoughts even when not involved in internet conversations or communicating via text. Sometimes it just passes by I'm not even aware that I've done it. Others it bugs me... I feel like I'm more addicted than I ever wanted to be to internet speak. Outside that though it intrigues me I know how I'm responding to something because of the thought emoticon or acronym but what would I have felt if I hadn't had that there ready to come to mind? Would I have laughed instead?

The World that is Blogging

Sooo... Up until now I have to admit some skepticism about the fad which is blogging... The public presentation of personal or even private information for the world to see. To think they wonder why privacy in the age old sense of the word is well... no longer and it now means something else entirely. The world has embraced the internet and the ability for people to seek others who, outside the restrictions of social courtesy, share their opinions and they dreams... Possibly due to the fact that the world has become obsessed with the recognition of minority groups. People no longer strive for normal instead looking to be as unique as possible without being alone. '

Much the same as youthful rebels of every generation look to rebel uniformly against the previous generation. People have now set out to rebel away from the world with its strong push towards equality and the technology which effectively shrinks the planet from weeks of travel to sheer seconds. The once blacks and whites of eastern vs western culture, women vs men, age, perhaps contreversially of race against race are shifting into murky grays and people find their identities not nearly as special as they once were. While nobody can deny it is wrong to discriminate on the grounds of red hair or brown, black skin or white it was the way of things for a very very long time.

People are socially geared to be discriminated against. People hate the very thought of discrimination. They get bees in their bonnets and those of short fuse may explode in disgust at the mildest of discriminatory remarks. Yet the reason they were like that, the very reason they were getting discriminated against, was the sense of belonging to something. Some part of people doesn't expect people to understand, doesn't WANT other people to understand. From early in life, even poorly treated children, are against the idea that anybody else in the world would understand why they are going through. Other people aren't them they can't get it. If they get it then what the individual is feeling, what their going through, can't be as uniquely bad as they feel it to be. For many that's not good.

People don't want to have to share histories, ideals, hobbies or even favourite colours or foods with people they don't know or dislike. People they don't think are like them CAN'T be like them. Otherwise what have they got that's theirs? So the move towards equality to the disapproval or discrimination is causing a rise in people out to get the point across. People yelling at the world, 'I AM DIFFERENT! Don't treat me like everybody else!'. People have been covertly striped of their identity through the work of equality.

The wrong thing about the worlds current equality goals is it is almost communist in wanting to treat people equally rather than treating people differently based on who they are. For many people they cling to the fact that their nationality still means something. However in countries like Australia while new comers migrating into their nation hold close many of their social things from home Australians of 4 and 5 generations are saying they can't stake a claim on their heritage. Why else are Australians who can trace themselve back to convicts calling themselves of English decent rather than being able to say... yeah I'm an Australian born and bred proudly.

So for many even nationality has become something lost in the swirl of gray equality. Blogs and other technologies grouping people from across the planet into minority groups so different to the classics of old will continue to be popular. People need to have people they can connect to on a level which isn't the same as the people of the world they see as different to themselves. Discrimination will continue to exist because of its essential connection to humanity and individuality. The negative connotations need to be striped as much as possible from the act of seperation between people for differences be they social, physical, cultural or idealistic. Not because people should be judged for their differences... but because they shouldn't be judged for wanting to be with people who share those similarites...