Welcome! It's been a while since I took the time to blog, so I just want to say thanks for taking the time to read this. I know the site (and possibly my writing) will need some tweaking in the weeks to come, but as I start flexing the old muscles hopefully everything will come back to me.
Why am I writing? Well, before I answer that question, let me give you a little background info about myself.
I spent my late teens and early twenties attending university, a fairly average guy from a fairly average little city called Kingston, situated halfway between Toronto and Ottawa in southern Ontario. It was in university, taking Psychology and Sociology at Ottawa U, that I started really becoming aware of the social trends swirling around me, as the university crowd offered a vast and varied collection of young minds, each one a wealth of diverse opinions and observations. I took Psychology because I wanted to understand people better, and what better way then to simply socialize amongst as many different groups as I could find? Getting out became a form of homework for me, in a sense.
Sometimes, just listening, you can put together patterns that you might never see if you just hold up your end of a conversation, waiting for the other person to finish speaking so that you can have your turn to talk. If you really listen, and try to understand what a person is really saying, you can read into the mountains of subtext, and few pointed questions can open up whole new worlds of information. I may only have a B.A. in Psychology, but I can say with pride that I can read more from expressions, gestures, clothing, and personal habits than most can. If you add this to what I can learn from an actual conversation, I think I'm a great judge of what makes a person tick. By extension, (and because I tend to ask a lot of questions on the subject), I also feel I have a pretty good grasp of what makes society tick, or at least our society. Put another way, I often feel like a sociological meteorologist (say that three times fast); able to see the way the storm will shift by reading the subtle currents.
So, this social spider sense, or whatever you want to call it, allows me to pick up on some interesting trends, and that, in a nutshell, is why I'm writing. I write because while many trends are interesting, some fall into the category of "downright disturbing", and need to be discussed. I don't just want to pontificate either, I want to start a debate. I want people to talk about some of the things that I feel (and I know a lot of other people feel) need to be talked about. I want to change the way you see your world, so that maybe when you walk away from reading this you can walk away with the desire to change the world around you, or maybe just change the way you interact with it. I think to most of us it's self-evident that the world is pretty flawed and needs to change, we just need to come together to figure out how to make that change for the better.
I had a few trends I wanted to discuss in more detail, but that will have to wait for another entry, as it's late and my brain is slowly shutting down. I hope that this tantalizes you a little, anyway, and that you'll humor me by reading further, once I'm refreshed and freshly caffeinated.
Upcoming topics include: How Advertising is Changing Us, Superfluous People, and Miley's New Single.
... just kidding on that last one.
Luke
