I remember distinctly when the word "awesome" reentered my stream of consciousness. It had been dormant since the mid-to-late-'80s, but in a bar downtown about 8 or 9 years ago, I was telling a story that had more "schaden" than "freude" to it. My friend Baly looked up at me and said, "AWESOME." It was the perfect punctuation mark.
Since then, "awesome" has bizarrely rolled through a cultural reentry like a tornado in Western Massachusetts. While there are some applications of the word that work-- I'm specifically thinking of the Awesome Foundation, whose very engaging Awesummit (!) I attended a few weeks ago-- I have come to generally cringe at what this word represents for our current zeitgeist, and especially social technologies' role in creating it.
I'm going to risk sounding like a finger-wagging old lady here, but in the early days of online social networks, especially with the arrival of sharing status updates and mood swings, people shared a huge variety of experiences from their daily lives. This led quickly to the cliched retort to avoiding social media: "I don't care what you had for breakfast!" For those not used to seeing social updates as a steady flow of information rather than individual nuggets needing processing, it can be overwhelming to see all the little bits.
But the little bits are what ultimately make humans interesting. Each one of those minor updates start to paint a picture of what one person's life looks like. Technology writer Clive Thompson described them as points in a pointillist painting: each update on its own is not that interesting, but together they create a rich portrait of a life. Maybe it's not critical to my existence that I know you like Chobani yogurt, but together with lots of other pieces of information, I can see what kind of person you are. And that's critical for developing relationships with one another, digitally or otherwise.
Of course, the sharing of minutaie hasn't disappeared on social media. But what I have noticed is a shift in my networks away from sharing the ordinary pieces of life fabric to focusing on the bigger, flashier, grander (or more grandiose) moments. Teh Awesome. Social media is a performance, Baratunde Thurston told me recently. Every day, that perfomance may be becoming more about creating the public versions of ourselves that we want to be, and less about sharing portraits of life. We are creating wittier, snappier, sometimes angrier, humblebraggier avatars. Everything is awesome.
Blogging went through this schism over the course of its evolution. My first blogs were one that was an update of my personal website, and a secret diary, complete with pseudonyms and disguised locations, of my adventures in early-2000s Manhattan. Once political and professional blogging went mainstream, Livejournal and other diarist-oriented sites took a backseat to the sites and services that hawked "ideas." Now I have a blog on my website for my work, but a separate Tumblr for more personal observations. I remember telling proto-blogger Dave Winer about that split a couple years ago, and he jokingly nudged me, "Oh yeah, of course, no one would want to read your professional and personal thoughts in the same place." Schism complete.
Now that social media has made it more accessible for millions to share whatever their thoughts may be, a similar schism seems to be cracking open. The awesome (both good and bad) are favored over the ordinary. And we are missing out on the fabric of our daily lives when we omit the ordinary. Last fall, I had an opportunity to explore what it means to be ordinary in a culture so obsessed with awesome. In the book Mastery by George Leonard, he notes that only a very minute percentage of our lives are milestones. The rest are the plateaus in between.
As much as we encourage each other to be passionate about the things we do with ourselves, being passionate doesn't mean "everything must feel awesome always."
We end up deeply disappointed when it doesn’t, when it just feels average. One of my favorite books is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera explains the title when he points out that sometimes we long to be oppressed emotionally, pulled into the earth, so that we can feel like we’re alive. If we’re livin’ easy, we float away, and our lives and feelings become distant and half-real. It reminds me of this mistaken passion for work. We want to be in the thick of it all the time, and as it turns out, we’re missing a lot of good opportunities there on the plateaus of ordinary.
When I ran this bit by [my mentor] Ruth Ann, she also pointed out that we have to spend sometime considering—and likely changing— what we think is awesome. In the big picture, we didn’t wake up dead (gotta give my pop credit for that phrase), so we’ve already started out ahead. Sometimes that doesn’t feel like much, or it feels like a platitude. But that’s exactly the point Ruth Ann is getting at, I think. Every day actually is awesome. (She says every moment is awesome, and every moment gives us a chance to make another choice about which thoughts to entertain and which thoughts to dismiss. Every moment gives us another choice about what action to take or what action to cease.) And it might be, on the surface, exactly the same as the last moment, the last hour, the last day. In that sameness, in the ordinary, in the equanimity of average, we are given the opportunity to explore. Up to us to answer the call.
I'm hoping that the schism between ordinary and awesome doesn't take hold in social media, that this might just be a passing phase as we navigate the terms for using new tools. Now, if you'll excuse me, time for me to go have my awesome morning Chobani.
