# hashfogged

There's more here than meets the eye.

I am trapped in an information bottleneck.  Caught between what I need to know, what I think I need to know, and what I have set out to accomplish (amid numerous other priorities), I am in real danger of becoming stuck on stupid.
   
Information overload, dead ahead.

Now, about these hashtags.

A hashtag is a means of assigning a smidge of information its own little place in the search engine universe.  A hashtag puts information in your electronic junk drawer. A thread is its container.  A bunch of other people's junk is in there too.  There's some hope of finding it later.  Really.  Your personally created hashtags contain a wealth of information about you and your habits.  If you create hashtags regularly, you are likely a profiler's dream.  Beware.  A search bot looks for hashtags in a much more systematic fashion than you or I.  It aggregates these bits into a Frankenstein Monster of living, breathing data.  On the internet, you are the sum total of your content.  If you lean more toward shoe shots and dizzy gifs, you can always adjust your content creation upward.

Ask yourself, "What is my data doing at any given moment?"  

LaShanda Henry, that question never gets old.

Data crawlers labor deep within the data mine, digging up marketing gold for the lucky few with a stake in the claim.  This aggregation of information will outlive each and every one of us.  What does that mean? Conversely, the internet lives and dies with the power grid.  No electricity, no internet.  What does that mean for those humans who do not live in the developed world?  In times of disaster?  For national security?

 As we chart our course on the frontier of the Fifth Dimension, let us be aware of the costs involved.

Currently, The Cloud is a Conundrum.  The Thing is Alive!

I took these pictures.  They are my intellectual property.  I am the self-proclaimed "Queen of Content."

Clouds are always there.  We take them for granted, until they collectivize themselves into a typhoon, super-size unto a hurricane, or twist and shout into a tornado.
Or unless there's a drought.  Then we do a rain dance.  Try to make it rain.  Pray for rain.

Fog is something else entirely.  Fog is often beautiful.  Beautiful and deadly. Fog itself obscures the way forward. Too much light on fog, and we are blinded.  Fog engenders pile-ups and carnage. Fog clouds judgement.  I am hashfogged.  I attend to the conversation in the Jungian jungle of John Kellden's intellectual

salon, and I am scared.  People well-versed in this stuff see a future you and I cannot see.  They are making their way through the hashfog, and I am mighty doggone glad that they have chosen to be a beacon lighting the way, rather than a wraith guarding the path.  (It seems that the word wraith has its origins in the Old Norse word for 'guardian,' according to Webster's New World Dictionary, 2nd College Ed.) There are many reasons to become cognizant of the implications engendered by our online lives.  You really cannot do that without a thorough grounding in SEO and social media psychology.  An entirely new group dynamic is arising out of the World Wide Web.  There are rules of etiquette, ranging from "ALL CAPS INDICATE SHOUTING," to "Be sure to uncheck 'Notify by email'!" There is a paradigm shift afoot, me hearties!  A new social order is evolving, and quickly.  Hashfog is obscuring the tip of a titanic data-berg.  Don't ignore the signals just because you're aboard a really big [Google] barge.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog.

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