Here’s a bit from Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Over on 3:40 a.m., MCARP talks about the effort it takes NOT to blog and how he thinks he’ll go to an every-other-day cycle. I’ve written about how my “intimate” friendship with MCARP is two-tiered: we see each other a couple times a week or so, but we read each other every day and it seems like I know him better than I actually do or don’t (or something). I have a similar feeling of knowing my readers and the writers of other blogs. Elsewhere on AS’s Time Magazine sponsored blog, there’s discussion of “Lost intimacy” and “False intimacy” and “Forced intimacy”, all powered by telecommunications and the internet. Maybe someone somewhere sometime would actually like to talk over coffee about such subjects with me, but I think it more likely that will happen online.
blogblah!!!
Chris Bowers unloads here about what blogging has done to his consciousness, sense of self, and general life. Money quote:
Try to imagine this: spend a week where you write for about sixty-five hours. Now, consider the following conditions on that writing:
* Whatever you write will be read by tens of thousands of people
* The material and research you use to produce that writing will almost never be of a personal nature.
* What you write must mesh with a perceived set of expectations of the content you have previously published.
* This is done almost entirely in virtual space, where your contacts take place over email, in comment threads, and on the front-page websites. Overall, you hve little human contact with either your colleagues or audience.If you did this for a week, you might start to sense, however slightly, your ego merging with your writing. If you do it for three years, at some point you might notice that your ego has been largely subsumed into this activity. Think about this. First, your thoughts are always directed outward toward matters that do not directly refer to you. Second, commentary on you is always directed toward your writing and your blog, never to you personally. Third, there is basically no one with whom you can commiserate about your activities on a daily, or even weekly, basis. If you do this long enough, eventually your sense of self will be largely subsumed into the activity of blogging, and even into your actual blog. And maybe your blog connects to other blogs, and even to a wider movement. Your sense of self can be merged with those institutions as well.
The very devices that keep us (peripherally) connected to other human beings—human beings we might never meet, or might never have met WITHOUT the aid of these devices (as in, a Viennese girlfriend)—seem to also serve as moats, keeping actual human beings at bay.
Consider the phenomenon of text messaging, which is the rage among the young, who wouldn’t dream of making an actual phone call to a friend when they can laboriously punch their encoded bullshit out with their thumbs.
And why do they prefer this to actual conversation?
Because when you text somebody, you don’t have to bother with the messiness of a free-flowing conversation. The stilted nature of texting is preferable to having someone out-talk you, or say things you’d prefer not to hear.
Some people form conversation groups that meet regularly so they can sit across from actual human beings. There’s one at the Red Cup most mornings. Wish we could see you there from time to time….
but first you have to submit an application in triplicate and wait for approval via text message. That way we can keep the riff raff out. Yours is still in the application process. We may reject it John X because of your unnatural attraction to midgets. Text me and we can talk about it.
There are a few things I know about communications. One is that people will express things over the phone, in IMs and/or emails differently than they would in person. I also think there’s a difference in the communications between the phone, an IM and an email. Mostly, it seems that people are much more abrasive and brash in telecommunications and far more soft spoken and nonconfrontational in person. I experience what Macluan would call the medium being the message. Personally, I’ve been known within the past year to write letters in longhand because that is yet another way of expressing one’s self that produces a very different kind of discourse between humans. To me, it seems extraordinarily intimate, but that’s the Romantic that remains hidden behind my cynicism.
The other thing I know is that sometimes when you trip and slip and almost fall and you look back and can’t see what it was you tripped on, then it’s almost always the damn midgets with their tin cans and strings.
blogblah!!!