Intent & Aims

I have a vision for how we can use the internet to organize, develop, network and promote ourselves towards achieving our goals.

By manipulating existing Web 2.0 social media tools, I aim to create a model for how we can use the internet to make ourselves.

Why and How

The 'Make Yourself' project.

I've been deliberating over this project and its conceivability for at least 3 years now (and many years before that, when it was just a part of me and not yet something I could apply myself to). It makes sense more and more as time goes on and as things untangle themselves in my mind. One day at a time, new facets become clearer and, in turn, shed light on everything else - quite the life metaphor!

The 'project' you may have heard me referring to has to do with a new means of interaction within the social media world. We live in a time where things are changing quickly and drastically. Perhaps not everyone notices this. The world of social media and social communities is on the cusp of changing our lives forever. This is what I believe. I believe our communities and interactions will not only exist in reality, but will also have virtual depths of existence.

This Making JGB site represents how I envision people to be using the internet in the near future. I believe we will be projecting our lives into the internet - what we do, where we go (where we are, even), who we're surrounded by, what we're learning, what we're applying ourselves to, where we see ourselves, where we intend to go, etc.

Clearly, we are already doing this. Facebook has taught us that people are interested in our lives - your 'friends' want to know your everyday status, they want to see your pictures, they want to know which events you're attending. Whether we like to admit it or not, we are human and ego-bound - all this attention paid to us is something we can't help but want to indulge in and be a part of. FB is but one example of social media that deeply affects our everyday life and social interactions.

The way I see it, we will soon become our own broadcasted channels. We only relatively recently realized that Reality Television is something we're drawn to, no matter how trashy or irrelevant to our lives it is. Soon, we will become the reality television programming.

Right now, all the big wigs out there are trying to get our attention through advertising.
Everywhere we go, things are marketed to us: products, services, media (TV/film), etc.
Everyone is fighting for our attention. Every visual space of our world is blanketed with marketing. WHAT IF instead of only being marketed to, we marketed ourselves?

Everything being marketed exists to appeal to us on some level - either it's something we can personally relate to, or it's something we can use to enhance our everyday living or it's something that provides entertainment and distracts of from the everyday grind.

I believe each one of us appeals to one another on some level - either because we have things in common or because we can come together and enhance our everyday living or even just because we want to be entertained and/or distracted by one another.

We all have our own personal qualities. Our own personalities, interests, skills, abilities, goals and more. We all want different things. Marketers of the world are after our personal information. But PEOPLE of the world are also after this! The people of the world need one another to create projects, business opportunities, to share knowledge and information, to build resources, to create useful products. What if, instead of being marketed to by blind advertisers/corporations, we started marketing ourselves to each other?

By way of projecting ourselves into the internet, we are marketing ourselves. Drop the R and the T in marketing and we are making ourselves. By making ourselves we can engage and interact, apply ourselves, build communities and inform ourselves in ways that are personally relevant, beneficial and developmental.

The above theory and concept deserves much more exploration and thought. I intend to further develop these thoughts and premises through my project and blogs. But for now...

I am creating 'Making JGB' as an example of how I see us projecting and broadcasting our lives into the internet for all to see. By putting forth my personality, thoughts and involvement in the everyday world, I am branding myself as JGB. Like a marketable product, I am unique. I have something to offer and something to show the world - I want to engage in these qualities with the world willing.

So it seems - if I believe that people can market themselves and broadcast their individuality online, then it seems clear that I must put my theory to the test and see if it is conceivable.

Thus - these are the ways in which I will use social media tools to both organize and share my life online:

I will link to the social media tools I have projected my life into:


Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Last.fm, Vimeo, etc.

I will blog about various tenets of my personal life and personality:


Films I Watch (am interested in and moved by)

Music I Listen to (and discover)

Blogs I Follow (a compilation of interesting things I find in the blogs I follow)

Pictures I Capture (see my everyday life through picture diaries)

Food I Eat (recipes, how I feed my body with the energy it needs, etc)

Places I Go (events I attend, things I recommend doing)

World I Travel (the earth I've seen and how it has enlightened me)

People I Meet (how I interact with them, how they affect my life)

Things I Use (gadgets, tools, etc.)

Thoughts I Think (things I dwell on, theories I come up with, things that move me)

How I Spend (we all spend, but in very different ways)

I will document the progress of the projects I am working on:


By applying project management applications to my endeavors, I can track my progress and keep valuable tabs on the intellectual properties I am developing. I believe that compiling information (by way of scanning, documenting and writing) about the projects we work on may help us to prove our day-to-day involvement in the projects we develop. One of the major problems we currently face online relates to intellectual property - a subject I will delve into through blogging.

I will compile information of interest that come across online in my Wiki:


The internet, literally, is a vast online space of uploaded information. It is our job to wrangle this information in order to be able to put it to use. Google has learned how to do this for us, by providing us with a genius search engine that answers almost any question we have and points us towards sources of information.
The internet will only keep growing. Every second, more and more information is thrown into cyberspace - in the form of entire books, videos, images, blogs, and so, so much more.

In my everyday online life, I come across hoards of information that I find useful on many different subjects of personal interest. I intend to use wikis to compile this information I find useful. I believe that if we all compile our own wikis of information, we can become specialists in our interests - and those of us that share interests can help one another to compile information on any given subject.

I intend to make a timeline of my life and share it with the world:


Each one of us has experienced life in drastically different manners. Even if we share the same country and/or culture, our parents influences, our childhood experiences and our genetic makeups lead us to infer and interact with the world in different ways.

By taking the time to map out my life's experiences, I can shed light, share who I am and how I came to be. I believe it's important that we all see and realize how similar and or different.

PLEASE PLEASE - Do follow my life. Do comment. Do discuss with me in person or online. This is my social experiment. This is my life's work and I want to share every bit of it with you.