Avalon

On Sharing

Monday, April 21, 2008

We live in a world promoting freedom of expression and emphasising while encouraging the display of personality. The fact that the majority of us who own computers spend at least 60% of our daily lives talking to them and making sure our 'relationships' do not go haywire tells alot about our reliance on these supposed tools we initially invented to lighten our load and alleviate our problems. I am not going to talk about how we are slowly subjecting ourselves to enslavery and servitude under the increasing pressure of computers. Let's go to one thing the internet and the computer has brought us: file sharing. We just need a few big incidents like the accidental leakage of a private bedroom photo collection, or the tremendous success of yo*tube to tell us how much we still yearn to connect with the rest of the world even if you get holed up in front of the computer at home.

Sharing, ironically, is so generously carried out in cyberspace that one might feel it is a selfless act of care. We make the effort to upload videos we source from other sites, or contribute music videos or movies from our own CD stash, even to the extent of going the extra mile to make sure the quality of the files we have uploaded do not differ too much from the original. Such a helpful spirit, if channelled to reality and work, would probably be revolutionary in terms of the number of workplace miracles that will result from all this amount of positive energy. But until then, we will just continue to enjoy basking in the free, pleasurable sharing environment created in the very heart of cyberspace.

In reality, we all share a common hobby though: we are collecting problems everyday, and this is a collection that will never end.

On a side note, I received this comment that made me feel, helpless...

"Oh Mr Tan are you from China?"

"No I am Singaporean."

"Why is your chinese so good?"

*pauses*

"I can speak english too."

"Omg more english coming from you!"

"..."

I couldn't really decide whether I was feeling more nonchalant or irritated by such stereotypical, unjustified, irksome fallacies.. But once again it probably proves that billingualism isn't that much of a strength we can boast of ,when we disprove it among ourselves.

Envoy of the Stars @ 10:57 AM
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