Effects of blogging

[snousle]

I've been thinking about the effects of blogging on the mind. It's not inconsequential. I definitely experience the effect where real-life happenings are dominated accompanied by an internal narrative of what I might write about it. Is this good, bad, or just a different way to frame the same stream of consciousness?

It's not like blogging has displaced real life, I'm not spending TOO much time indoors, and the blogs are decisively secondary to the real world - the purpose of the blog, in my mind, is to make the real world more interesting.

Tyler Cowen wrote a few words I think are spot on, but which seem rather too good to be true:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

Can't help but LOL on that last point, it sure got his audience spun up. ;-) The comments and links in his post are worth reading.

The maintenance of my soul is something I take with unusual seriousness; careful avoidance of TV advertising, judicious (but enthusiastic) use of drugs, following up on all curiosities with the miracle of Internet research. It's hard to separate the effects of blogging from all these other habits but since it's the biggest single time sink it is subject to unusual skepticism.

I can certainly say that my life is richer and more interesting than it was ten years ago. Even the smallest experiences evoke rafts of association and knowledge. Seemingly inconsequential things are saturated with wonder and pleasure. Did the blogging help make this happen? I like the results but remain uncertain about the process.

Maybe these new information technologies are creating a small, elite class of super-intellects with a historically unprecedented relationship to knowledge. Wouldn't that be interesting.

Comments

[kevynjacobs.livejournal.com]

I can certainly say that my life is richer and more interesting than it was ten years ago.

I wholeheartedly agree. Journaling -- especially journaling for an audience, and being the audience for others' journals -- has made me feel far more connected to the world than I was before. I'm grateful for the existence of things like LiveJournal.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

My brain and probably yours are more at home in the world of the net and the iPod than they ever were in the world of linear sequential media. Which means that there is a whole information environment we can dwell in that is *our native medium*. Which means we feel less and less like freaks.

[bbearseviltwin.livejournal.com]

"Maybe these new information technologies are creating a small, elite class of super-intellects with a historically unprecedented relationship to knowledge. Wouldn't that be interesting." That is basically what was going on during the Renaissance. An elite group of men who had previously been culturally isolated were suddenly in communication with each other due to the printing press and the greater flow of knowledge due to improved roads and relations between countries. Where previously an idea might take years or even generations to spread from one part of the world to an other it now only took months.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

I believe that language and behavior dictate each other.

This stems from reading a good deal of Suzette Haden Elgin, who suggests that a language is a reflection of the behaviors, values, and ethics of the society using it.

Thinking of blogging could be considered (in my mind) as a sort of meta-language. Internally, you're considering how to express what's happening to you.

It seems to me inevitable that at some point, in the course of considering how one would blog an experience, one would also consider the reaction that such a blogging would bring. This in turn might well lead to the consideration of alternate courses of action if the original intention would bring a negative reaction from the blog's readershop.

Think of it as e-peer pressure.



In other worse, blogging

[oscarlikesbugsy.livejournal.com]

Blogs are windowframes on the world.

[mellowtigger]

"I also feel like using a stream of text to convey structured information (a logical argument, a pattern, etc.) is probably wrong. But that's a more general problem with all textual information."

I like that response. :)

technologies

[1ticor.livejournal.com]

BORG!