Digital Hippie Strikes Back

i've heard the term "digital hippie" and "cyber hippie" (because it was a term used for me) and while i fully understand the direct connotation I disagree with this assessment of my person. I'm not offended. But annoyed i be.

you're a zealot, missWanda, they'll say

you talk about wiki and tagging and new media in terms of revolution, missWanda, they'll say

Well, that's true. Not the zealot part, but the rest, maybe. I've spent a large portion of my still-short life observing and analyzing communication. I'd be dr. wanda, psycholinguist now if i hadn't received an offer to enter the one industry i'd been aiming for (on the side) for....ever. (music). i digress.

Communication has been an obsession of mine since I was a child. the first word i learned to spell with alphabet magnets was "Annapolis" (the maryland state capitol) and by the time i was 3 i knew that "polis" meant city. Turned the age of 4 and i was making jr podcasts (sorta) - i started recording myself singing as soon as my dad told me what buttons to push. within a year i had my own show and was interviewing family members, the mail carrier, the lifeguard - I wanted to know what they had to say. I wanted to record it and play it back and think about it. Communication has always been my game. Diagraming sentences was fun in 5th grade. And the advanced class at hopkins was even more fun. Diagramming sentences turns language into math. I never stopped, took my love of breaking down sentences into all sorts of shapes, parts and sizes all the way to college and beyond. Does that make me a cyber hippie? to recognize communication for what it is?

Communication is also more than parts and shapes and numeric value. In sociological and anthropological terms, It is the fuel of revolution, it is the impetus of mass hysteria in all its varied degrees. It proved to be the death of Grizzly Man.

Communication was what i saw as the future of my 1st computer, the commodore Vic20. I couldn't wait to use a modem. I was obsessed with the phone jack in the 5 lb brick of a modem i first owned. i kept asking my grandma if i could use it to call someone else. But back then, well, we didn't have skype, or even IRC. just a vic20, and deep knowledge of BASIC. a language by its own right.

Where do i begin. it's not that i truly take offense to the term "hippie" - name calling is a bore. It's more the semantics of the term - the perception created by the use of "hippie." the name "digital hippie" implies that my obsession with communication is a nuance. Fleeting. Short-lived. it's negated to some level of Trippy man. Hippies never made a goddamned difference. I cannot relate.

In college, i became fascinated by Phineas Gage. Phineas had a hole in his skull from a tamping iron accident, got up and walked away (with the tamping iron still sticking through his skull) and his brain injury only affected his communication skills. He's the first documented case of aphasia. I went on to build a database of Broca's Aphasia at the University of South Carolina. The first of it's kind in the ENTIRE field of psycholinguistics! I read more books about brain injury and its effect on communicative skills than any normal person would ever want to, trust me. Wernicke's aphasia is neat, but it's no Broca's.

So you see, the natural event of having a gal who is fascinated with communication lost in a world of wiki, and obsessed with the consequences of every shift in communication - and how these shifts relate to music (also a form of communication by it's own right) is not the making of a digital hippie.

it's sexy.

ok, maybe it's not sexy to you.

but someone out there finds it sexy. Dwight, Hartigan and Marv from Sin City definitely worship it.

and just you wait, i haven't even begun to address entropy or string theory. talk about arousing.