What Start Good Means to Me

It's undeniable. The internet has revolutionized human existence, and with it, somewhere thirteen years ago in a small corner of the universe, I was clicking through my 56.6 k portal to "the world." My, how things have changed. As the internet transformed and evolved, so did I. Like many things in life, the web is what you make it. For me, it unknowingly gave me a voice that people actually listened to, and an identity amongst the masses. It started with a humble little thing called Xanga. A friend introduced it to me my junior year of high school and I ended up leaving it pretty much dormant for the first two years. Suddenly, I was a freshman in college and I realized it was the only thing that could alleviate the pressures of class, work and social life. It became a hobby, a stress reliever and a companion during some of the hardest times in my life.

Initially, xanga was a rhetorical dump of my daily habits and occurrences, but I didn't feel satisfied just regurgitating the events of my day. Over the next two or three years, I transitioned my online "agenda" into obvservations, opinions, critiques and general life lessons that I was able to filter through my daily routines. Miraculously, people read, people paid attention, but most importantly, people listened and identified.

And this was when I knew there was something more to blogging than dear-diary's. If my small speck of the web was able to generate a handful of loyal readership, imagine the possibilities of something more structured, independent, and on a grander scale. My greatest driving force behind xanga was the desire to plant seeds of thought and change in people's heads. As a student of mass media, I found that the more I learned about my concentration, the more I became pessimistic about society at large--and the more I felt that there needed to be a change--change in thought, cultural perception, values and beliefs. You could say I want to change the world. I'm not going to lie, I do.

So what does Start Good mean to me? It means an online space for people to learn and share from one another, all with the goal of making society a better place. A place that transforms ignorance into knowledge, that brings awareness for the world around us, something that shows there is more to life than all-about-me. I hope that Start Good becomes an environment that facilitates respect and appreciation not only for our individual selves, but for the people we often overlook, or don't care to look at.

Everyone has a story. And every story has a lesson to be learnt.