It’s surprisingly easy to forget that, what you are seeing through the glass of your computer monitor, or smartphone, or tablet, is only one viewpoint.  It’s skewed viewpoint, inhabited by a broad range of people that, for one reason or another, have the time to put their thoughts, hopes, dreams, hurts and fears out into the ether where anyone can see them.  And that what lots of this stuff is.  People’s inside voices (even professional peoples, who are being paid to speak in this medium, are lured to say things they might not consider something to say aloud).

You are looking at the world through a distorted lens.

I’m not using distorted here as a negative.  There are Good Things to be viewed through this lens, just as there are Bad Things.  But it is human nature to focus on the Bad Things, those are often important things, the ones that can take you and your whole group of somewhat advanced primates out of the picture if you don”t LEARN from those bad things.  And because of the way linking and page ranks and all those nifty tools we use to drive traffic work, it’s very easy to drop down the rabbit hole.  To spend your entire day going from Bad Thing to Bad Thing (or Good Thing to Good Thing) so, by the time you shut down your screen for the evening, or morning, or whenever, those Things are going to color your day.

The point is, and it’s something I have to remind myself of, because I spend a lot of time in front of Screens, that it’s a tiny window onto the world, like trying to see the world only through the peekaboo in your front door.  In order to retain perspective, you have to look out through other windows as well.  It’s the difference between viewing a snapshot and a movie.  One shows you the overweight lady at Walmart, whose kid in the shopping cart has a plastic bag on their head, the other shows you the full 30 second sequence of the kid playing with the bag, putting it on their head, then the mother taking it away and putting it in the bin.  Two different lenses, two different reactions on the part of the viewer.