some half-baked goodness

(c/o Life Is Good)

Thinking back to blogging-intensive days of yesteryear, I vividly remember the feeling of a thought swirling around in my head.  I'd ruminate on it, and then it would collide with another shrapnel thought from a completely different experience.  To connect these synapses, it usually warranted at least a slight pause to make sure I could consciously explain what was happening.  The whole thing was rather dizzying (of course, coffee helped), but everything usually turned out fine . . . so long as I could spit it out somewhere.

The spitting is key, I think.  Personal blogs are really spittoons.  They were designed as a side-kick receptacle for things that need to get out of your mouth, but that might not be socially/culturally appropriate.

I don't have a loogie, but there's definitely some spit.

Here goes:

After making my coffee, opening my screens and clicking on some things to wake up, I find myself in this odd state of mind where I use words unquestionably that I'd ordinarily censor from myself.  Nothing bad, per se.  No swearing or vulgar-type phrases.  No, none of that.  

Rather, I use -- quite liberally -- words that connote 'goodness'.  Words by which our culture progresses.  You know the culprits . . . good, sweet, awesome, amazing, brilliant and (the biggest offender) great.  

Obviously, the words have no intrinsic badness.  Or goodness, I guess.  It's all about the context.  My curiosity rises in my own liberal use of the bastards, though -- why are those the go-to pieces of language?  My first thought would be to point out that there's sort of a natural ability for people to curate the experiences around them as 'good experiences' or 'amazing things' or 'brilliant thoughts' . . . but if you think about what it means to curate something, I'd imagine we're sort of lacking the latter part of the activity.  Rather than just placing a label of 'good' on something around us, curating actually connotes collecting, as well.  Assembling in some sort of order, arranging in a certain way, or simply clumping together to experience at a later time.  Not sure we do that for ourselves.

But, things like the ubiquitous 'like' button and other social bookmarking sites allow people to access worthwhile information at a later time.  And share it.  I suppose this might be the closest thing we have.  Er, I mean . . . tool, I guess.  Other cultural thought aggregators like Good Magazine are steering this way, too.  Picking out goodness, publishing it, sharing it, what have you . . .

But, just because these new tools are popping up, doesn't necessarily mean we have license to use these words without the ethical obligation to consider what we really mean when we whip out 'good' words.

Upon first consideration, I seem just lazy as fuck.  We're soaking up so much stuff/information/etc that despite our best efforts, the best label we can give something is related to 'good.'  Really?  Seems a bit tragic that with all the words we have in our linguistic abyss, the layer we choose to call out as superlative is how good it is.

Considering the genesis of our 'good' label, the incredibly oversimplified thought process goes something like this, I'd imagine: starting at 'hmm, I wonder if this is new?' to 'oh, that's interesting' to 'this is good stuff!' and landing at 'I should share this.'  Intriguing, interesting, valuable, shareable.  Maybe that's just how I experience it, and maybe there are some more nuances to that process, but consider that a Mental Processing 101 version of the different layers tapped into as we swim in information. 

The sharing bit is another immensely interesting part of the whole thing, but in hopes to not get terribly wrapped up in a tangent, I want to keep my eyes on the value bit.  Sharing is worth unpacking at another time, no doubt.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I started spitting this out when I found myself writing down these words and asking myself a couple of questions.  Here are a few, just to document my current thoughts -- there are undoubtedly more.

(1) PERSONALLY - How am I processing this piece of information?  Is is being logged in the 'good' stack?  the 'really good' stack?  Am I going to want to do a better job filing it?  Or is alright if I simply verbally star it to come back to it later?  How might this compare to something that I tagged as 'good' or 'sweet' yesterday, when I was wading through much more of the information marsh?  More important?  Am I just attaching a superlative label to it for its relative goodness amongst a collection of 'less good' stuff?  

(2) SOCIALLY - Do I need to further specify what I mean when I say 'awesome' or 'amazing'?  or is it sort of culturally understood if I simply post it on twitter/facebook or email it to a friend?  Do I even need to attach a verbal label to it?  Or might the value be somewhere in our relationship-based shared subconscious, thereby mutually understood by simply posting/sending it out?

(3) CULTURALLY - What am I actually adding to culture by slapping my own label on a piece of information and publishing it for the world to see?  Especially if it's not groundbreakingly new or terribly unique.  Are there timeless labels/tags to connote 'good'? or might there be more culturally relevant ways to tag what we see that is worthwhile?  

Anyway, these are obviously all over the place.  And I haven't even tapped into the 'bad' end of the spectrum, as that might unleash a completely different discussion given the political atmosphere our country is breathing in.  But, I think there's some value in picking through the words we use to get to communication that more accurately gets our point(s) across. 

When looking at the words we use and the way we use them, it seems there are increasingly more ways to publish the 'goodness' we find (and badness, at that), but fewer ways to discern between different layers of that same goodness.  I'm sure there are some implications, but maybe that's for another day . . .

Might need some more coffee first.  The swirling seems excessive with this topic.