nobody asked…

Just returned from Tamar’s place where I read her post entitled “We shed our land legs to sing in cyberspace”, PLUS ALL the comments. Rarely do comments interest me nearly as much as the original post, but this one is different in a way I’m still trying to define for myself. So bear with me, please…

Click on over and read Tamar’s post AND the comments. Then come back here later for the continuation of my emesis, which will use the same post name “Part 2″. May take a little while, this being a holiday weekend with other time demands…

PART 2 May 30 (Continued in the original post so as to keep my plea for help at the top)

Being a newbie … aren’t we all? … I’ve done considerable thinking and reading about the impact of the “blog” (God, how I have come to hate that word!) on our culture, our society, and on us as individuals tangled in our multi-layered matrices with others like and unlike us. Most of the popular (read “uninformed”) media seem to interpret this great new method of communication in terms of how it will influence markets and elections. Some recent examinations by the more technically oriented media expand those notions to include organizational intramural collaboration by project teams. Certainly there are seeds of truth in all those limited assessments, but they seem to miss what may be far more significant if we attempt to look 2 or 5 or 10 years down the road we seem to be traveling.

Somewhere around the age of 12 or 13 I got a “pen pal” through Boys Life, the Boy Scouts magazine. Hari was a lad about my age, also a Scout, who lived in India. Over a 2 or 3 year period until he left for University, we shared and compared our experiences of life in rural Tennessee and urban India. So much was different on the surface, yet so much more of what really mattered was the same. That “sameness in diversity” was to become one of my earliest awakenings. One of my “Memorabilia” boxes still contains all the letters he sent. I wonder what ever happened to Hari.

As a teenager I studied, practiced using a key, and squeaked by the exam to become a Novice class Amateur Radio operator. The world was mine to explore on my chosen 15-meter band. It was gratifying to reach out for “conversations” with fellow hams, none of whom I would ever meet in person. For a while. The drag and drudgery of Morse code seemed so archaic and limiting, but was the only option open to a Novice. Time to take my General test came in the middle of my first semester in college; needless to say my attention had turned to other more pressing priorities, like how to deal with “crazy little women” and how the hell to get through Calculus 101. Never did learn enough about either of those.

A few years later, then living in Iowa, I was in the first wave of hobbyists to put up a gawd-awful CB base station antenna on my house. 10-4 Good Buddy…The Handyman backatcha… But talking to a half-dozen or so “local-yokels” within a 5-mile range and trying desperately to carry on any intelligent conversation with the truckers rolling through on the nearby interstate soon lost its luster. Wanna buy one slightly used base antenna?

The intervening years brought other increasingly sophisticated forms of communication, some point-to-point, others broadly cast. I tried them all. Portable phones, faxes, pagers, cell phones, email, buddy-lists and IRC (never did those last two - too many problems, too much risk). Now the wonderful world of the weblog.

Both of you who are still with me and haven’t either snoozed off or clicked away, are probably mumbling to the tune of where the hell is this guy going? What do a childhood pen pal and a 10-4 good buddy have to do with the original thread over at Tamar’s place? Maybe nothing…maybe everything. I am an engineer, not a sociologist, though I have studied sociology. I am an IT (Information Technology) professional (read: fixes computers and networks for pay), not a behavioral psychologist, but I’ve also had courses in that. Maybe I’m sort of a techie version of Al Capp who claimed to be an “Expert on Nothing with Opinions on Everything”. Maybe we need some professional help in figuring this out. Or maybe I need to get back on my medication and shut the hell up! But just a few more thoughts before I wrap this…

Foreign pen pal, ham radio, CB radio, blogging. The common denominator in this progression is anonymous communication, or as the title lifted from Tamar’s posting suggests, “the dynamic of anonymity”. I can be who I want to be, say what I want to say, in a relatively safe and non-threatening venue. Even though some of us display photos and bios, who is to know if those are real or otherwise. Just as some of us use our real names, others use pseudonyms, or as I prefer to call them, “chosen names”. We do not really know…or care…about the “real” gender, race, religion, politics, social standing, or the myriad attributes that tend to influence our perception, feelings, acceptance or rejection of other individuals in the real face-to-face world. And for that reason alone, and even if we have donned a made-up personna, we may be more honest and revealing, accepting and tolerant, here on the planet we call Blog.

I agree with Frank Paynter’s comment on Tamar’s post that “the friendships we build online are reason enough to pursue this new form.” Reason enough, yes, but not the primary reason or result. The non-threatening openness and honesty in communication is what I felt was important SIGNIFICANT about the original thread. For it is in questioning that we learn, in sharing that we grow.

So, what’s next? My gut feeling is that whatever it is, whatever it is called, it will extend/expand the paradigm of the blog, both as realtime communication and archival information, onto something small, portable, wearable. Poddish, but smaller, better, different. Think Dick Tracy’s wristwatch. And if we don’t change the drift and direction of the feds, the gadgetry will probably be implanted by edict at birth. But that opens a whole other can of blog fodder.

I am exhausted! Original intention: a couple of succinct comments. Reality: auto-biographical ramblings, bordering on psychosis, most likely without saying anything coherent or worthwhile.