Friday, September 30, 2005

This Thing We Do

So, this blogging thing that we do... Kinda cool, right? I mean, yeah. Like, the pre-1990 version of this was...what? Newsgroups? BBS's? Bzzzzt. No. Well, sort of, sometimes. But really? Not.

And no, I don't have some rare insight about blogging that hasn't netted, desiccated and pinned to a board by now. I was just marveling once again about how unprecedented and cool so much of the Internet is, and today's particular gee-whiz is blogging.

In high school, one of my English teachers assigned a daily journal for each semester. Due at the end of the semester. Both semesters, I stayed up all night the night before it was due writing all the entries -- I didn't have to pretend that I'd written them earlier; the assignment just called for X entries, with zero content restrictions (within reason for a high school course, but that was just implicit). So I just riffed and wrote stream of consciousness stuff and transcribed Monty Python skits and whatever else popped into my 17-year-old head at 4am.

And now, almost 20 years later, I'm publishing those random half-formed thoughts instantaneously for a global audience. (Well, o.k., a potentially global audience.) And see, you obviously think that's pretty neat, too, 'cos you're reading this.

But this time, I'm doing it daily. In "realtime," as the kids say. So I have this record of what I (and great big bunches of my friends, and assorted Very Smart People that I don't really know yet) thought about and experienced on a given day, week, or year. I can't help but think how incredibly useful this will be 40 or 50 years down the road when even the new memory enhancing drugs aren't doing much more than keeping my car keys out of the freezer.

Assuming I remember to back all this up before the big one hits, that is.

Anyway... Thoughts?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

nah, I gave that up. Too hard, and stuff.

3:30 AM  

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