Longtime readers of this journal know of course of my absolute glee in coining new phrases to describe new developments in human culture -- I do, after all, like to think of myself as somewhat of an amateur futurist, no matter how erroneous a belief that might be, and no matter how few of these phrases I've coined have actually caught on with the general public (and by "few," I of course mean "none"). And I invented yet another new phrase the other day, in fact, to describe a feeling I've been experiencing an increasing amount this summer, which at first seems bizarrely unique to just my own life, but then I realized is probably experienced by a lot more people these days than most of us could even guess.

And that phrase is "Global Singular Disorder," or GSD, which describes a certain mental state that one can sometimes achieve, when one is a heavy consumer of amateur online user content from around the world; not just the feeling that one has visited certain places around the planet even when one actually hasn't (which let's face it, is nothing new anymore), but instead the very feeling that you're living there right now, that you're simultaneously living in six or eight places around the planet at once, even as your brain rationally acknowledges that such a thing is logistically impossible. It's an intense feeling, one that can sometimes screw with your head for short periods as profoundly as something like hypnotism -- just this overwhelming surety all of a sudden that you are at that moment actually in London or Sydney or Berlin or San Francisco or Cape Town instead of where you really are, or perhaps even some fictional amalgam of all these cities that doesn't actually exist in the physical world.

Now like I said, I'm convinced that GSD can only come with being a heavy consumer of amateur creative content online; and that's because I've only been feeling such a thing myself since the beginning of this summer, which is the fist time in my 25 years now online that I've been heavily ingesting amateur creative content from around the world. Because that's something I want to try to get across as clearly as I can today, although I'm afraid maybe I won't be able to, because of it being such a subtle thing; that the feeling I've been experiencing this summer is different than a simple recognition of "global culture" to begin with, which is something I've been living with for ten years now and have gotten quite comfortable with over that time period. Indeed, it was this first explosive exposure to global culture in the 1990s that led to so many people like me back then maintaining the prototypes of blogs in the first place...which led to millions of others being inspired to maintain blogs themselves...which then led to blog software getting more and more sophisticated...which eventually led to entire cottage industries devoted to specific subjects but based on the "attitudes" of blogs -- like podcasting ("like blogs for music"), YouTube ("like blogs for video"), Flickr ("like blogs for photos"), etc.

I used to talk about this all the time back in the '90s, when I first started this journal of mine; of how surprisingly mindblowing it was to write about what I considered the boring minutiae of my everyday Chicago life, and suddenly having people passionately reacting to it from Estonia or Israel or Japan or Argentina or wherever. For example, for those who don't know, in the ten years I've been maintaining a presence on the web now, I've gotten emails from people in 38 different countries, a fact which used to astound both me and everyone else a decade ago but now mostly elicits bored shrugs. And that's because a decade later, all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph have actually come to pass, leading to things now like 60 million blogs around the wold that are now updated on at least a monthly basis, a quarter of a billion photos at Flickr, who only knows how many millions of amateur streaming videos. In the span of just ten or fifteen short years, we have gone from almost no one being online to a growing amount of people actually living a quantifiable percentage of their entire life online; where if you add together the amount of time that person spends updating a blog or podcast or MySpace page, consuming other people's content, and interacting with others via IM, Skype, Second Life and the like, you can literally say things like, "Yes, that person spends 20 percent of their entire life online, and that person spends 30 percent."

I'm one of these people, for example, now that I'm running this arts organization I recently opened, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (or CCLaP), now that my job precisely is to showcase the best amateur online creative work I can find. Would you like to hear, for example, just how much user content Im plowing through on a weekly basis these days?

--At least a skimming, for example (and often a detailed reading) of over 300 RSS feeds, representing everything from major newspapers to personal blogs, constituting something like 1,500 unique "articles" every 24 hours;

--A real-time tracking of over 180 photographers and 75 groups at Flickr, constituting approximately 600 or so unique images I at least glimpse at per day;

--Approximately 25 podcasts, producing 10 to 20 total new hours of audio and video to consume each week;

--The listening of 30 to 40 new Creative Commons songs each week, to find the two or three I feature in each episode of the CCLaP Podcast;

--Not to mention the dozen YouTube videos checked out each week, all the new blogs, all the reader tips, all the random recommendations, and all the hundreds of resulting Wikipedia pages providing more information.

Whew! And this is on top of the two to three full-length novels I read each week these days as well, plus the two to three full-length movies I watch, so as to write reviews for at the CCLaP website. Double whew! Now that I'm no longer an artist myself but an arts administrator instead, consumption is the name of the game for me; and in this I am much more now like the average global citizen on the web, who takes in a lot more content than they usually produce. And like I said, I can feel something changing in me these days because of it, because of taking in just so much damn input these days from around the world at once; and not just taking in finished artistic projects like has always been the case in the past, but now with half of this material simply being candid records of everyday events, shot and posted by non-professionals. That's another important difference here to note -- not just that I'm consuming so much amateur creative content these days, but that so much of that content is simply photos of friends at parties, tales of frustrating days on public transit, videos of teenage skaters goofing around in their school's parking lot, audio conversations between intellectual friends at some random sidewalk cafe.

It creates a sense of profound intimacy with that area of the world, the more and more such material one is exposed to from that area of the world; and of course because of certain cities being much more popular these days than others when it comes to user content, so it is that I seem to be developing these unusually intimate feelings for a host of specific cities around the planet these days, places like the aforementioned London and Sydney and Berlin and San Francisco and Cape Town, places like Tokyo and San Paulo and Copenhagen and Ljubljana. And like I said, it goes beyond just the familiarity one develops after consuming a lot of media from a place; it's a whole new kind of familiarity that comes from this media constantly being updated, from it being rooted in one specific neighborhood and constantly showcasing a small amount of neighborhood venues, from it being rooted among one small circle of friends who you actually come to know as acquaintances yourself. It's one thing to simply see a bunch of photos of London online; it's quite another when you track the stories of two dozen of its citizens on a daily basis, featuring images and stories and audio and video from the same neighborhood landmarks over and over and over, under a variety of slightly different conditions based on the weather and time of year.

Like I said, it creates a situation which I believe is brand-new to the human condition, a situation which deserves its own term since it's so unique -- a sense that you are as caught up with the day-to-day dealings of these places as some of its actual citizens are, or at least are experiencing the kind of regular engagement that goes way beyond the typical tourist and the typical holiday. I've never actually been to Dublin, yet I can give you walking directions from its main train station to several of its most well-known pubs. I've never been to Australia, but I can describe in surprising detail what many of its youth think of the current local political situation there. I can tell you where the hipster neighborhoods are in Oslo, where bored stoners go in Blackpool to get high; I can tell you which garage band is fighting with which other garage band in Moscow. The corner of my computer screen gives me the weather in Frankfurt at the same time I'm checking the weather out my window; it also lets me know that my friends in Bali are currently asleep, that my friends in Lisbon are drunk and partying, that my friends in Texas just started their workday. And not only that, but that for at least one person in each of those areas, I could send a message to them right that moment through my web browser at home for free, that would instantly reach them through their mobile device no matter where they were or what they were doing.

And this is maybe the final piece of the puzzle, as far as differentiating the mere acknowledgment of global culture from GSD; the idea that this profound affinity for a far-flung place has partly to do with the increasingly interactive nature of the online and physical worlds, the increasingly 24/7 nature of it all. That the world is increasingly becoming a place where people no longer sit down "formally" in front of a computer and "compose" a piece of user content (or at least no longer only do that), but also create and post it on the go from their mobile devices while out in the physical world, able to receive real-time feedback from around the world to that mobile device as easily as sending the content was in the first place. And again, this is highly applicable to my own life as well, which is maybe why such a thing as GSD is only hitting me for the first time this summer; I do in fact, for those who don't already know, maintain what's known as a "moblog" on top of this personal blog, which I update almost exclusively while on the go through my mobile device, a Palm Treo 650. (The company that hosts my moblog, VOX, in fact has an excellent free mobile client available, which is why I maintain my moblog through them in the first place.) And since I have Gmail Mobile on my device too, anytime someone sends me an email concerning one of these mobile entries, I get the feedback in real time as well.

It's something about the online world I still haven't gotten used to yet, to tell you the truth, despite having one form or another of such a thing for over three years now; this idea that I can be out and in whatever kind of mood I'm in, and am able to capture an image or video or a few thoughts concerning that exact moment in my life, and 30 seconds later have already shared those thoughts with however many tens of thousands of people who read my moblog now, a certain amount of them in real time no matter where on the planet you're talking about. That's still a trip to me; still something that seems like a science-fiction dream instead of the banal reality of my actual life.

There's something to all this, I'm convinced; that the overwhelming amount of everyday user content being posted to the web these days is starting to profoundly change the perception of global reality itself, of those who are most regularly exposed to it. That far beyond making us simply aware of an entire planet worth of culture and stories, it's making us a part of those stories, in dozens of locations at once, sometimes as profoundly as if we physically lived there ourselves. That ten years from now, all of us are going to understand the very concept of the world in a different way because of all of this; that it is bound to have the kind of surprisingly huge impact on politics, philanthropy, romance, small business and the rest that the mere existence of the web itself had starting around 15 years ago. And I'm sorry I can't precisely quite put what I mean into words, because I can't -- 2,000 words after I started today, I still feel like I didn't quite get my point across. But you at least get a sense of what I'm talking about now, or at least I hope you do. Anyway, as always, more thoughts on the subject when appropriate. See you later.