So like I mentioned here last time, one of the side-effects of me opening my arts center about a year and a half ago is that I'm simply making my way these days through a lot more artistic projects, from books to movies to photos to music and everything in between. This is in fact part of my job now, no matter how tempted some are to scoff at such a statement: as an arts administrator, it's simply part of my job to keep as caught up as possible with the general creative culture that exists, to have at least a dilettante's knowledge of as many different creative pursuits as possible, so to have a so-called "expert" knowledge on how they all relate and what's coming next. (And this is in fact part of what I do on a freelance basis during the day, for those who don't know, senior-level "futurist" strategy advice for corporate entities regarding what's coming next in the worlds of entertainment, online developments, etc; just contact me at [ilikejason at gmail.com] if you're sincerely interested in learning more.) So how this will often pan out in my particular life, then, is that the raw creative material itself will pile up over the course of a busy week -- all those songs featured at all those music blogs, all those sketches featured at all those drawing blogs, all those photos being posted at the Flickr groups I belong to -- and then on a typical Saturday or Sunday, I will sit down around lunchtime and go literally until that evening doing nothing but making my way through this material, a veritable multimedia orgy of Web 2.0 goodness: I will fire up Google Reader, start up 1001 (a photo-oriented feed reader just for Flickr accounts -- see the screenshot above), log into Facebook Chat, open up the folder on my hard drive with all the MP3s I've been downloading that week, maybe crack open a beer or load a bowl, and literally just lose myself over the course of seven or eight hours to this freeflowing instanteous sampling of culture from around the world at once, artsy things and candid things and silly things and astonishing things, eight hours of reading and looking and watching and conversing and laughing and crying and being moved and having my mind changed about certain things.

And that's what I really want to emphasize most of all today, how much I legitimately love and look forward to my Saturdays of doing such a thing, certainly as much as being on my bicycle on a warm Saturday and spending the afternoon out in the sun, most definitely a lot more than a winter Saturday afternoon of bad syndicated television while laying around on a couch eating potato chips, like I wasted so many Saturdays in my pre-internet youth. And that's had me thinking as well about this recent experience I had, of joining yet another online service that required me to fill out a profile, and having that service as part of filling out this profile ask me what my hobbies are, and me getting mystified in this deconstructionist way all over again regarding the question of what exactly a "hobby" is in the first place. Back in the sleepy '70s middle-class suburb where and when I grew up, for example, nearly all the middle-aged dads had at least one traditional hobby or another that kept them busy over the course of a Saturday afternoon too; and now that I'm a middle-aged man myself, it's had me thinking about what it is that you might call my own generation's shared set of hobbies, and of why middle-aged men are so fascinated with such pursuits in the first place. But since all our fathers were raised at the end of the Industrial Age, all of their hobbies of course revolved around physical objects and physical activities -- model trains, model rockets, rebuilding cars, landscaping their yards. So then is the lack of similar physical objects and activities among my own generation proof that the entire concept of hobbies is dying, that we are moving forward enough as a civilization that candid creativity is simply now an everyday part of all our lives, not something to be shuttled off as a special weekend activity? Or is it that since my generation was raised during the beginning of the Information Age, our "hobbies" are of course going to be of a similar aethereal nature, afternoons of reviewing and sorting and analyzing thousands of pieces of digital global creative culture like I just exactly described?

And so the more I look into it, and the more I study and parse the entire subject, the more I'm coming to realize (as far as I can tell, anyway) that hobbies can mainly be defined through three characteristics:

--They serve no direct useful purpose in a person's life, yet can be a powerful teacher of various general character-building traits -- patience, discipline, commitment, curiosity, attention to detail, etc;

--They're obsessively fastidious as far as the level of detail one can theoretically get into if one theoretically wants, all the way down to a scary meth-addict level of nervy fastidiousness if one chooses;

--And thus are these two things able to put the engaged hobbyist into a sort of happy trance under the best circumstances, what sociologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "achieving a state of flow," where the mind is open and receptive and churning along at this fantastically high level, while simultaneously losing all sense of the passing of time and indeed that it's even functioning at such a high level to begin with.

Certainly, for example, this is the state I can often get into during these weekly inhalations of global culture I do, and in fact I've talked in former essays about this being a major reason why I do it in the first place -- this concrete sense suddenly of being a member of a whole new kind of organized society, one based not on geography or race or religion but on the shared virtual destinations so many of us end up at online, the hundreds of millions of us who are regulars at Flickr and YouTube and MySpace, all the people around the world who update blogs and podcasts and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. I love the science-fictiony feeling this produces in me, that suddenly I'm not sitting in an apartment in Chicago at all, but rather some fantastical city that could never actually exist, that I could step out the door of my building that moment and somehow magically be in London and Capetown and Mumbai and Mexico City all at the same exact time. This is very much how it can start to feel, I think, after spending several hours casually devouring several thousand pieces of global creative culture, photos and videos and indie-rock songs and written blog entries, and funny little Facebook updates and live chats with random friends; it's during these periods when I can literally feel time slipping away from me, when I can feel my mind cleaning itself of its cobwebs and making new synaptic connections in unexpected ways.

And then of course all this takes on an extra dimension for me in particular, in that it's online where most of my socialization these days takes place too, because of what I've talked about here plenty of times before, of how I lost most of my Chicago friends during the early 2000s and now have only a handful of acquaintances here I physically get together with at all. And don't get me wrong, I still think that the complex benefits of physical interaction are a very necessary part of any person's life -- I still can't even imagine, for example, how people possibly presume to say that they're in a "romantic relationship" with someone they've never physically met, and still argue that such relationships are doomed to crash and burn every single time said couple actually do start spending time together physically. But that said, I do wonder many times these days just how much of what we consider traditional human physical interaction can in fact be faithfully duplicated through technological means, of exactly which aspects of being a "social creature" can absolutely only be accomplished through physical means, versus virtual ones that trick our physical senses. After all, what really is a dinner party but merely a group of friends gathered around a table, so that they can observe each other in real time while conversing? If the same group of people gather in a webcam-based chat room with full audio and video, and with the capability to have quiet little private conversations away from the main group, will the resulting evening be much different? I mean, certainly it would never be 100-percent the same, I definitely agree with that; but I find myself wondering a lot these days whether such a thing could eventually at least be 95-percent as good as a physical dinner party, given the continual rise in technology when it comes to this exact subject? Are we in fact in the process as we speak of constructing an artificial yet very real new space in the cosmos for human existence, a place where people around the world gather at once and interact just like they would if they all lived in the same city? The same one-billion-person city?

And that of course is why the very best way of all to end these Saturday afternoon-evenings of online global cultural inhalation is to eventually end up at a neighborhood pub around nine or ten o'clock in the evening, sometimes meeting up with a Chicago friend or a drink or two and sometimes just going out on my own, to have a nightcap and do a little flirting before yet another early weekend night to bed, because I'm middle-aged now and middle-aged people are fucking pathetic. Especially now in the winter, I find, just that ten-minute walk out in the bracing cold weather can be like a refreshing splash of cold water on the face, after eight hours of sedentary sitting and typing and mouse-clicking, a reminder of how great it actually is to be a physical creature out in the physical world; and then of course getting half-lit in a public space is a great reminder of what is so important about physical meet-ups, that the last five percent of human interaction the online world can't provide is the most important five percent of all, the five percent of smelling someone's hair or touching someone's arm, of body language selling a joke, of nervous stuttering making you fall in love.

Like millions of others, I'm trying to figure out where this balance lays in my life, this balance between living my life online and living it out in the physical world. But also like millions of others, experiences like these Saturday afternoons of culture-gorging are starting to force me to acknowledge the internet itself as a legitimate "place" in my head, a place where I legitimately "reside" for X amount of hours each day instead of residing in Chicago, where I have essentially left my body behind and become for all intents and purposes a virtual citizen only. And this is a hard concept for us humans to wrap our minds around, because of the ephemeral nature of it all -- of the internet not really "existing" in the way we traditionally think of existence, of not even the physical mechanics behind its existence being centrally located somewhere, of the shared billion-person space we know as the "online world" actually existing within the silicon guts of a billion little servers scattered evenly across the globe. It's hard for us to think of such a thing as an actual place, an actual destination that you can spend time at, apart and away from the physical world (and don't even get me started on the magical portals known as "cellphones" that connect these two worlds in mysterious real-time ways); and I'm sure that's why so many of us, myself included, have such a hard time defining our relationship with the internet these days, of what exactly it means to us and of how exactly it is both adding to and subtracting from what we've traditionally defined in the past as a "good life." Anyway, just some random thoughts on a Sunday afternoon, after yet another Saturday pondering all these subjects yet again.