An Essay on the Blog, Blogging, and the new society
Precis:
This essay, a little over 12,000
words, reviews the world of blogging. It includes some inferences about where
blogs came from, how they evolved and where they fit in the realm of
communications methodologies. It identifies a few blog-related resources and
cites a fair number of statistics with respect to communications capabilities,
particularly with respect to personal communications. It identifies and
catalogs blogs into categories and addresses some of the features of blogs. It
asks or raises questions with respect to where this new personal communication
world might be heading. It makes some propositions with regard to the future of
blogging and looks at implications of these propositions. Finally, it positions
an evolution in our view of communications and suggests some societal changes
implicit in this evolution.
Humans - we create and record our
lives
We have the cave drawings in France from 20,000 years ago. In fact, pretty nearly everywhere we look or dig or uncover we - humans - find evidence that our forebears, our not-quite-evolved ancestors, were of the sort that they wanted to record their thoughts, impressions, fears, wonders, wants, and aspirations.
One of the standard definitions of our species is that we're "tool makers." But that's not quite broad enough because the great apes also make tools as do other species. Another definition is that we "bury our dead" or otherwise commemorate their departure. But that's not quite right either because elephants gather at the site of a deceased member and spend a great number of days wailing and bemoaning the lost one. Dogs of certain breeds and wolves do the same, though for a shorter period. The simians have been observed doing elaborate rituals when a member of a clan dies. And mothers of all species go through elaborate "loss" rituals suggesting that humans are simply not alone in recognizing the "gone" nature of a soul.
So what is it, really, which distinguishes us as a species? I believe it's the "recording" of our lives. Not simply the "marking" of territory or the construction of permanent or semi-permanent dwellings. Species after species do these things but to my knowledge no other species creates its own history with constructs - words, art, structures. We do. These are the trappings of what it is that truly distinguishes us from the other creatures and that is our self-consciousness. It's probable that the cetaceans are also self-aware in perhaps the same way, they do, after all, create these wonderful songs. One might even successfully argue that a host of other mammals and perhaps a number of birds and reptiles also have self-consciousness. But, even if this were true, the only species to document that self-consciousness is us humans. We create our history and record it. We document our actions, our thoughts, our aspirations.
A quick search on Google will reveal that journals and diaries have been around since Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece - in that order. See <http://www.pomona.edu/Magazine/pcmsu00/1.shtml> for a discussion on the rise of writing in the proto-humans; see <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/magazine/19PHENOM.html?oref=login&oref=login> (free registration required) for a discussion on the implied and oftimes negative impact of today's blogs and the lack of an evolved ethic. On the distinctions between journals and diaries, I offer this abstract from a homeopathic site which advises using journals or diaries or both for their considerable self-healing properties:
HISTORY OF THE DIARY AND JOURNAL
Diaries:
Writing has been a part of man's experiences since the crude cave paintings and the hieroglyphics of the ancients. Diaries and journals have been in use for centuries, some of the earliest of them from Japanese works such as "The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu" (AD 978- ) "The Sarashina Diary" (AD 1009-1059) though much earlier texts have been written and preserved from various parts of the world. One such account is the 'royal diary' of Cleopatra (69-30 BC). Other royal leaders such as Tutankhamen left a tale with a mystery to end its story (1000 BC). One of the world's earliest known civilizations, Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia established and have been credited with inventing writing around (3500 BC). One legendary king who was named Gilgamesh or Uruk (2700 BC) seems to have one of the world's oldest known written stories -- a mythological account of Gilgamesh's search for immortality, "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The histories of royal families have been kept since the time they first appeared as rulers throughout the world.
Journals:
The ancient scribes left their mark in the world with the written word. It was they who left eyewitness testimony of their time and and place while here on earth. But, it was the Greek astronomers who took great interest in observing the cosmos by recording movement through the heavens and plot their paths over time. Their daily logs, called "ephides," contributed to the success of predicting the behavior of the stars and planets from year to year. These "ephides" became the basis for further studies in astronomy and the concept of a daily ongoing narrative–the journal was born.
The topic here is what do I think is happening in this new realm and what have I discerned about this realm from participating and observing now for the relatively short period of just over a year. Additional resources might be useful at this point and here are a few which I use:
Technorati - <http://www.technorati.com/> a San Francisco-based "blog" search engine and ranking service. This abstract from their "about" statement says enough to give you the picture:
Today, Technorati tracks almost five million weblogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.
Technorati displays what's important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place. Technorati makes it possible for you to find out what people on the Internet are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics, or other areas of interest — all in real time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting. Technorati provides a live view of the global conversation of the Web.
Editor's note: The URL for the Pew Internet study is: <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp>.
Blogdex - <http://blogdex.net/> a Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Media Lab-based relative ranking engine which tracks blog cross links. This abstract from their "about" statement will give you an idea of what it's about:
Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory <http://www.media.mit.edu/> tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.
Blogdex uses the links made by webloggers as a proxy to the things they are talking about. Webloggers typically contextualize their writing with hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects they are discussing. These markers are like tags placed on wild animals, allowing Blogdex to track a piece of conversation as it moves from weblog to weblog.
A couple of other resources that are also useful. This one tracks the blogs in the Metro Washington DC area - <http://www.reenhead.com/map/listversion.htm>; this one tracks the blogs in the Metro Seattle area - <http://seablogs.hellbent.org/>; Eatonweb Portal <http://portal.eatonweb.com/> is a compendium of blogs assembled by submission and reference, so is incomplete, but at least has a structure to the listing - which is useful; About <http://about.com> provides a weblog section <http://weblogs.about.com/> which, in typical About manner, is useful if a bit thin; and, give those Canadians credit, one of the ISP providers for Saskatchewan, Northern Lights <http://www.lights.com>, provides a useful, top-level, listing of blog directories <http://www.lights.com/weblogs/directories.html>.
And, if all else fails, use Google <http://google.com> (or the new kid on the block, Snap <http://www.snap.com>) and search on any topic plus the word blog - or any name and the word blog. Technorati and Pew Research variously estimate between 5 and 13 million blogs being published in the United States (including the territories, possessions, 50 states, DC, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) and between 20 and 70 million worldwide (which includes the US). These same "authorities" also postulate that the number of online individuals who read these blogs numbers from 20 million in the US to 90 million elsewhere for a worldwide readership of an estimated 110 million internet users. The Central Intelligence Agency's World Fact Book <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/> estimates that there are roughly one billion online citizens on this planet - that's all countries. Some, of course, are more wired than others, but even Zimbabwe is shown to have 100,000 regular internet users and the number of Americans is estimated to be 136.5 million for "home" use, with an estimated 185.55 million including home and office access. That means that nearly one sixth of the living inhabitants of this planet have some form of internet access. Earth human population as of December, 2004, was estimated to be 6.4 billion by the US Bureau of the Census. So what have we got, then, with respect to online diaries, journals and blogs? Fifteen percent of humans have internet access, 1.7 percent of humans read blogs, and less than one percent of humans write or post blogs. That's if we use the upper numbers from the Technorati and Pew Research estimates. If we use the lower numbers, the readership stays pretty much the same at 1.7 percent of the total planetary population, but the authorship number slips to three-hundredths of a percent. Although that's not insignificant, given the population of the planet, it is vanishingly small as a creative component of the total population dynamics.
Whlch leads us to this conclusion about the current electronic state of journal-and-diary publishing - it is a recent and new endeavor which is being engaged by a fraction of those who have the basic technical capabilities. The earliest blogs were actually the website directories being published in 1992-93 by CERN and NCSA as part of the then-evolving web browser and HTTP universe. Classic weblogging (of the sort we see today) appears to have begun in earnest in 1999 using new software, which at that time, enabled the automatic posting of text and images with a tracking system for commenting and maintaining live links to web-based material which was moving about in the directories of the home servers. Userland Frontier and its kin were in those first generations of content-management and publishing tools. Today, there are at least half-a-dozen server-side tools which do essentially the same thing, including the Userland software suite. There are also nearly a dozen free-hosting services which provide the basic functionality of these tools to users such as Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and even Microsoft's new MSN Spaces. Like all new tricks, there is a lot of development going on for what certainly is a fraction of the potential market or audience. in that sense, anyone blogging today is still in the forefront of the evolution of both the technical elements and the sociological elements.
It's the sociological elements which I will try my hand at analyzing in this piece.
I've noticed a variety of styles and content on these millions of blogs. And, to be sure, a blog is different than a journal or a diary. In fact, some existing websites have begun to resemble blogs. Websites which contain sections allowing for conversational threads such as Slashdot <http://slashdot.org> or sites like ESPN <http://espn.com> which have message boards produce the same result as if they were blogs. Many sites of authors or artists or even politicians contain sections where visitors can engage in a threaded discussion. In a sense, the web has evolved into a communal participatory village green with blogs being the latest incarnation of what might formerly have been the corner store, village parlor, local pub, or even bully pulpit.
Of the formal blogs, websites which use "blogging" software or servers and have the express purpose of serving as a blog, there breaks down a litany of categories which, to a degree, represent the current human universe of interests. There are blogs on cooking, sports, politics (of all flavors and colors), regions, interests, and persuasions. There are blogs which cover the news from any and all political bent and there are blogs which cover the many elements of a religious life for all the world's religions. These are categorical blogs and their existence is no different than the previous incarnation of this phenomenon in the last evolution of human communication - magazines and newsletters. Anyone with an interest in even an obscure pastime or hobby or profession can find at least one and often a variety of publications to subscribe to, most with a "letters" or "comments" forum which further engages that unique audience. The evolution of the web has allowed these multitudinous interest groups to maintain and enhance their connectivity and cohesion by reducing the time lag between these communications. Whereas previously a magazine or newsletter might have a weekly, monthly, quarterly or aperiodic publication schedule, the new blog covering the same topical area has a publication frequency of minutes or hours and certainly no less frequently than days.
This has certainly provided a useful and necessary forum for the evolution of technology. Particularly so with respect to the web itself and the machines which both run and browse the web. It would be difficult to imagine a world today where a Microsoft or Apple or Sun or HP didn't have an online forum for users of their software or a third-party website where users of that software could exchange ideas, share problem fixes and discuss issues associated with the use of a vendor's products. These sites are among the most popular elements of the web.
At the same time, the use of the web for personal perspective publishing has enhanced our access to not only raw information but also the enhanced information and knowledge which others have on everything from specific topics to generalized awareness. In the eleventh century in China, during the Ch'ing-li Period, a commoner named Pi Sheng used the first "movable type" to produce a book. The type was created in clay, fired, and placed in a form upon which was the printing press. In the fifteen century, Johannes Gutenberg recreated that technology using a modified wine press in Mainz, Germany, and the East and West worlds have not been the same since. And, like Pi-Sheng's or Gutenberg's printing press, other evolutions have dramatically altered the human communications landscape. The introduction of the telegraph and later the telephone erased distance and time from human interaction in ways which could not have been foreseen. More lately, the world wide web and the subsequent proliferation of cellular telephone technology and the consequent combination of the two with the added advantage of built-in cellular camera capabilities into instant web publishing has made our planet smaller than anyone could have imagined and possibly smaller than most would like.
With one billion humans online and somewhere between 20 and 70 million online publishers, what is actually going on? Clearly most of them are publishing from a specific perspective. The political, sport, hobbyist, or single-flavor blogs are published from the perspective of that political view, that sport, that hobby, or that single-flavor (as in the Red Corvette blog, or the Canon EOS blog, or the new mother blog, et al.). Once you begin to subtract the Technorati Top 100 (and subsequent "next 5,000") and remove the "new" blogs, the political blogs, the single-topic - single-flavor blogs, the associated blog-like websites (like Slashdot, ESPN, and others of that ilk), one is left with a still-large variety of what wind up being "personal" blogs.
These personal blogs take a variety of shapes and forms. There's those which allow for comments and which engender threads through the comments section. There are others which allow for comments but which are positioned in such a way (either through choice or limitations of the software being used - either deliberately or as a side-effect) that threaded discussions cannot occur. Then there are those for which no comments are possible. They merely describe the deliberative or conversational aspects of these "personal" blogs.
From the reduced set of blogs left (once the ones cited have been removed from the universe of blogs), we have an odd view into the personal lives of those publishing these journals, diaries or "blogs." A huge subset of these personal blogs are apparently being published as if they were diaries. That is, they recount the inner thoughts, feelings, wants, joys and sorrows of the publisher. These could be the work of individuals who are exhibitionistic in nature or who are shy in person but less shy when once-removed by means of the electronic publishing of a diary-blog. There are a fair number of these and they range from the timid and tepid to the near sordid and salacious (as in publishing the author's opinion of the previous evening's date and after-date bed-time activities). Many of these name names and otherwise spell out what would normally be very private aspects of their and other people's lives. In some instances these diary-blogs have already created legal issues whereby an individual cited in another person's blog has sued for defamation or violations of privacy. Since there are no recognized hard and fast rules with respect to these types of blogs, the development of case law in these instances will engender a form of near-term, legally-binding "codas" which will be overlaid on the existing and unfettered freedoms of the diarist-blogger. Of course, this is as it should be because even under today's existing legal strictures one cannot defame or otherwise impugn the reputation of someone for purely personal reasons and not expect some form or personal or legal retribution; nor can one disclose acts or actions or the discourse from what would be construed as "private" moments in a public forum without the same expectation of legal or personal retribution. These kinds of blogs range the gamut from, as mentioned, those which "name" names to those which offer a tremendous degree of circumspect distance to those mentioned. Some blogs merely cite "friend" or "lover" or "date" or "family member" without being any more specific than that and yet still reveal the author's innermost thoughts and personal views with respect to those cited.
These kinds of blogs are the ones which get news mention by the regular media and which, because they are exploring a new realm of disclosure with respect to privacy issues, will be the ones to watch with respect to setting standards and/or causing standards and laws to be set or enacted. This is a relatively new phenomenon because, although there have been exhibitionists and "disclosers" in previous generations of communications technology and sociology, there has never previously been as wide nor as "foreign" or unknown an audience as there is now for these electronic publications. There are technical methods whereby a blog can be restricted to a set of individuals - through password protection and access limitations. It's not clear, though, that the publishers of these kinds of blogs are really trying to protect anyone. It seems, to me at least, that these individuals are exploring a new form of "public" reality. A public reality where the private elements of one's life are displayed, discussed, and acted out on a public stage populated by strangers. That may be part of the allure for some and it may be an inadvertent consequence for others who don't realize the extent of access to their public disclosures. Nor do all who engage in blogging understand that there is an implied pact between individuals when issues of a personal or private nature are discussed. The implied pact is one where an individual expects to be notified if something disclosed in private is further distributed or disclosed to a larger audience. One might say that it is a common courtesy except that in the world of the web, in the new and burgeoning world of online personal publishing, there is no acceptance of a common set of courtesies. More often than not the author of a blog will state up front that "it's my blog and I can say what I want." Which implies that they can and will disclose private comments or events which occurred in private between them and one or more other individuals.
The natural and resulting consequences from such discourteous actions are that the individual publishing these kinds of comments and disclosing private moments with others will be shunned or dropped as friends by those whose privacy is felt to be invaded. So, perhaps there is a limiting degree of damage which these types of blogs can induce. There are already a series of consequences from the publication of private data by a Washington, DC-based personal diarist. In the case of some mentioned, they lost their jobs, in the case of the individual whose blog was the avenue of disclosure, she lost her job, lost her friends, and has lost her credibility. But, not before she brought a number of other individuals down with her. These results become even more unpredictable now that we have cellphones with built-in cameras and keypads which can be linked live to an automated blogging system. Of course, as in all instances of personal conduct, it's a question of trust and honesty. Don't go blabbing state secrets in your bedroom to someone who publishes a web log, or, if you do, expect the worse.
There are at least two more distinctive kinds of personal blog that I've run across. There's the blog which is a series of unlinked and seemingly random thoughts and comments and there are the blogs which are pretty close to and akin to the journals which an individual might have kept in the days of pen and ink. The random-event blogs are ones where the author lists a series of events, comments, or observations, all unlinked except that they occurred to the author of the blog. They cover the gamut from personal to professional to political to observations of human nature. These kinds of blogs generally solicit comment and generally support the threaded discussion format because, as often as not, a particular comment or observation will be one which strikes a universal chord in a segment of the readership of that blog. Threaded discussions show an originating comment and all subsequent comments which rejoin the original poster's comment. Threading technology has allowed web sites as well as blogs to develop a following along very specific topical lines and allows the casual observer to follow a discussion in minutes which may have taken days to occur in real time. And, because search engines such as Yahoo and Google now "crawl" the web on a continuous basis, the contents of an electronic author (blogger) on some obscure element of human nature is now categorized and linked to the rest of the web through the search term text box. Searching for any manner of random human event these days will result in several dozen to hundred "hits" with at least a fraction of those hits being the personal output of a single web log author. In the grandest sense possible, we are now linked to the observations and comments of those surrounding us - at least the one-sixth of the planet which has access to the web. The interesting component of this link is that an individual does not have to be an author of a web log, doesn't have to own a website or have a personal domain to have one's comments be captured by a Yahoo or Google search engine. Simply commenting on someone else's website or blog will result in that comment being tagged and tracked with respect to subject matter. In that sense there is no longer any real expectation of anonymity when yelling out a response in a crowd - at least if the yelling is on the web and the crowd is the comment section of a weblog. These kinds of blogs provide a daily capitulation of what's interesting, unique, or oddball about our world and these oddball comments are being accrued and sorted and categorized by some of the largest online systems imaginable. Forget the CIA or the folks at Ft. Meade, it's the Google search engine which is listening in to your online comments. Maybe not to the comments you make using an iChat or AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, but to those comments you might post to that website bulletin board discussing the Washington Redskins, or the Canadiens, or the Yankees, or a whole different set of websites pertaining to the Libertarian Party or Howard Dean, or even the use of specific hops by home beer brewers or the best chocolate to use in a mousse. The search engines crawl everywhere and it's still not clear that the millions of web users here and elsewhere realize this to the degree that they should. All comments posted in a public forum - and a website's discussion board and the contents and comments sections of blogs are public forums - are "public." That means anyone and everyone might, can or does access them. Again, it's the public nature of this which needs a deeper look.
There are also the "journals," these are blogs where the individual authors take the reader on some form of journey, either an exploration in a space or an exploration in a time. Think of these blogs as the modern equivalent of the Lewis and Clark journals, or of Darwin's journal, or any other writing of that sort. Many of them are in the form of travelogs and follow an individual around as he or she explores their world, oftimes while island hopping or continent-traipsing, either through Europe, Australia, Asia or even North America. One recent example of this was a couple's adventure on the road for one-hundred-and-one days to see as many states and provinces as they could in one single road trip. Each day they reported where they were, what they ate, how they viewed the residents and artifacts of where they were and what that "place" and "people" did to them insofar as their frame of mind, their spirituality, their zeitgeist. There was one finished this time two years ago which followed the exploits of a Chicago blue-collar worker who lived in Indiana and wanted to take his Harley-Davidson on a ride to the furthest place where roads exist in North America. It was a seven-week excursion with his comments on the day's activities, what he saw, what he photographed (he used silver-based film so had no "live" images), how he was treated, and, because he was on a motorcycle, the condition of the road as he ventured farther and farther north above Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. These kinds of journals - blogs - are fascinating because they allow the reader to vicariously experience new spaces, new people, and with the benefit of imagery, to actually see some of what is being described. The authors of these journals generally give a bit of reference with respect to who they are, what their expectations are at the outset, how they have equipped themselves, and what sorts of experiences leave them in what state of mind or mood. Through this type of background, one can acquire a sense of perspective to the writing and with one's own personal "windage" follow along in a relatively easy manner but still acquire a deep sense of the adventure the author has set out upon.
These kinds of blogs, the journal blogs, can range from the fast-paced, as with the 101-day tour of North America, to the harrowing, as with the Harley guy from Indiana who nearly lost it several times on the muddy roads of the Yukon, to the slower-paced and more deliberate wherein an individual explores things more close at hand and in more depth, providing some additional background and history gleaned from library or web research such as the blogs of the home-brew electronic music artists. My journal (the web version of these email texts) is such a blog. It explores my continuing understanding of North America and more specifically my deepening knowledge of Seattle, the Puget Sound region, and the Northwest in general. But, it has other dimensions. My journal explores the impact of the evolution of communications technologies on the sociology of humans and attempts to understand the evolution of the modern, 20th and 21st Century urban environment.
Of the personal blogs, which are probably less than a quarter of the total blogosphere (as the universe of blogs has been nicknamed), the breakdown seems to be as follows (without statistical reference, this is based on my observation over time):
1) The personal exposition-diary type blogs seem to represent about fifty percent of the available or cross-linked blogs. These blogs have a common feature in the listing of URLs for associated friends or other blogs the author follows on a regular basis. The software available for blogging encourages this type of linking. Many of these blogs also identify which other blogs have provided "trackbacks," or links back to the author's blog. In the purest sense of the word, these blogs are self-referential and in an interesting offshoot to the concept of the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon," these blogs can lead through a path of blogs right back to the originating blog. A great many of these personal diaries encourage and facilitate the use of threaded comments;
2) The random-event, non-sequential type blogs appear to represent about a quarter of the personal blogs. These too, contain references to other random-event, non-sequential blogs and through the use of these embedded links one can explore a vast universe of truly unusual or unique events and happenings on a daily basis. These kinds of blogs also use the trackback capabilities and many of them also use the threaded comment features to further solicit random event citings and references;
3) The journal-style blogs also seem to represent the last quarter of the personal blogosphere with the difference being that many of the journal style blogs do not necessarily encourage either comments, or if they do accept comments, the threaded discussion format. Much of the journal style of blog appears to be an exposition form of writing rather than an ad hoc or extemporaneous style which the diary type and random-event type seem to be. Which is to say that the diary style and random-event style blogs seem more often to consist of pithy and short comments strung together over a period of a few hours and often updated within the same day. The journal style blogs seem more like essays assembled on a schedule or associated with a schedule and less extemporaneous in content and approach.
Some of the journal-style blogs follow the actions or events associated with a "time" rather than with a "space." Such examples are the blogs kept by individuals living with someone who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease or who might have been diagnosed themselves with a form of cancer. Some of these journals follow a couple as they go through the nine months of a pregnancy and the birthing of a child and the first months to years of that child's life. Although at first glance these kinds of blogs may seem more like diaries they are journals because they identify a theme and provide a foundation for that theme and build upon that theme to some higher knowledge or subsequent event or action.
Realize that all of these published, online, personal stories and events and recountings still represent a few hundredths-of-a-percent of the existing population of this planet. Now the question of what the consequences of these blogs might be and where we might be going as a society of humans becomes a more interesting and more difficult question. If this richness of personal stories, these deep and well-written (in a large number of instances) journal and diary entries is such at this ratio of authors-to-planetary population, what will happen when the ratio of authors-to-planetary population approaches one-to-one?
Implications of Blogs on Technology, Sociology, the Law, and Us - the People
We can draw some parallels from the recent past. It took nearly 20 years for television to become ubiquitous throughout the industrialized world and another ten for the remainder of the planet. It took only 10 years from the first satellite-based cable channels to today's world of a satellite-cable-linked planet. It took only five years from the earliest days of modern, small, cellphones to the near-ubiquity of these devices today. It's true, cell phones have been around longer but the first decade they were little more than portable radio transmitters recalling their brethren from WWII in size and usefulness. With the advent of MCI and the breakup of Ma Bell in the early 1980's, the cachet of "long distance" began to disappear. No longer did anyone run to pick up the phone when someone said "long distance calling." Today, the concept of long distance is almost as quaint as the notion of receiving a telegram. And, with the increasing rate reduction and special plans available for foreign country access, the notion of international dialing is also approaching quaintness. It will not be long before webphones make serious inroads into international long distance. Once that happens, the telecommunication carriers will follow suite as they have in the past and international phone rates will tumble. Voice-Over-IP (webphone) is a technology lying in wait. More than half of Americans who access the internet now do so with broadband. In the other G7 nations (classically the US, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada), the percentage of broadband users to total internet users is greater than 50 percent.
When we consider the fact that 100,000 of the 12 million citizens of Zimbabwe have internet and use it we begin to see the path of this technological revolution. Some countries, such as India and mainland China, have skipped whole evolutionary periods in telecommunications and jumped directly from a situation of less than one percent of the population having wired phone systems (based on central exchanges) to a situation now where 300 million Chinese, or 20 percent of the population, have cell phones. Forty-four million Indians have cell phones. In the US, roughly 50 percent of the population has a cell phone. In Europe, that number is between 60 and 70 percent. Cellular telecommunication carriers are expanding the capabilities of their networks to the degree that a cell phone is now a cheap alternative to a home computer and browser. With blog updating and uploading now easy and possible via cell phone and with more and more cellular networks offering RSS capabilities, anyone on the planet could post a diary or journal report and have an expectation that several billions of cell phone users could download or read the contents. RSS means Real Simple Syndication and is an information protocol which allows someone to "subscribe" to another web page or blog or online set of published items.
[a technology aside - looking at information overload ]
A number of parents across both America and other countries have expressed dismay, concern, even alarm at the number of hours their children spend with video games, both console and computer-based, and both singular and online multi-participant. Many of these same parents have limited the number of hours their children may spend with their gaming equipment. Other environmental, educational, and genetic factors being favorable to the nominal development of the child, gaming offers something which these parents do not realize and which is a significant evolutionary advantage for those who are involved in gaming. Gaming provides an information-rich environment. An environment where a surfeit of data is present and yet some of the data is redundant, some of the data is irrelevant, some of the data is "non" data placed there to confuse the gamer. The gamer must select from this surfeit that data which is relevant to the gamer's present gaming environment and/or goal. This is a multi-dimensional, multi-temporal data processing requirement. The gamer, be he or she a part-time, avid, or addict gamer, spends a portion of their gaming time involved in data processing - data selection, data assessment, data assimilation, and data reduction. Gamers may not even realize the extent to which they are involved in complex data processing tasks.
This assimilation of skills associated with data processing is an intrinsic component of the gaming environment. It is intrinsic to the gaming experience. Without even considering the eye-hand coordination skills required, the eye-brain coordination skills are exceptional. This is true for the most benign of games to the most salacious and violent. The richness of the experience is in the details presented to the gamer and those details include an almost endless supply of data nuggets to be mined, examined, reduced, and potentially saved or used. This may seem obvious for puzzle-type games, but it is equally true for straight shooter games.
These data processing skills are then used intuitively in the gamer's other world - the "real" world. We are all bombarded with information - from billboards, from television and internet advertisements, from superfluous public announcements, from overheard conversations or over-the-shoulder experiences with other computer users. Many of us have a plethora of information appliances from our cell phones, our Blackberries or modern-day Newtons, our laptops, our watches, the radio or CD or XM-Sirius receiver in our cars, to the programmed babble of King County Metro bus drivers (or DC Metro subway operators). Our children are growing up in a world which is overflowing with information. How to select appropriate channels and appropriate messages and how to ignore or otherwise reduce to background noise those messages which are interference? This skill is not taught in our schools yet. It's not necessarily recognized as an issue by many (if not all) parents. And yet - gaming teaches these skills as a native component of the gaming experience.
Instead of lamenting the "lost" time individuals spend on games, instead of bemoaning the violence or salaciousness or mind-numbing moronic nature of games, instead of denying the gaming experience because of fears of brain dulling - we should be embracing gaming and identifying those games and game genres which further enrich the development of data processing skills. I'm the outlander on this argument, and yet ,not only do I have empirical proof of the value of my view (my own now-grown-up kids), I have the advantage of the intuitive proof of the concept: Games are complex; they are multivariant; they are multi-temporal, they are multi-dimensional; they provide a continuously-altering landscape with multiple planes of information. In order to be successful, one MUST become adept and adroit at information processing and data reduction.
That means that we are in the midst of a generation of individuals (well, maybe two - Gen-X and the inappropriately-named Gen-Y, the twenty-somethings and their younger siblings) who have native skills with respect to information processing which exceed our learned skills. The younger set slide seamlessly from a picture-cell phone to a blog to an online game to a research project involving multiple pages with different Google queries. And, they do it without thinking of what they are doing. I'm one of those who worries not about the fate of those much younger than me. I laud their bravado and their innate skills and their fluid use of technology as an integral component of their lives and that of their colleagues and friends.
Technological Future of Blogging
The technological future of blogging can be easily imagined - in fact it's almost pre-ordained to happen somewhat like this: More people will begin to publish journals or diaries; more cell phones and Blackberry-like devices will have intrinsic capabilities which tie in with existing and evolving blog servers and software; voice recognition software will come of age and cell phones will be the new dictation machine with the output being an online web page somewhere. Real-simple-syndication (RSS) feeds will continue to take hold and most formalized and in-formalized web publications will offer RSS feeds - many at a detailed level. This is nearly true today with the various email postings one can subscribe to from the major online publishing sources. This is almost universally true for blogs as a subset of the web world. Aggregators, software which receives a series of RSS feeds and assimilates a string of discrete and different postings into a single, threaded, "article," already exist for most of the popular browsers and email clients.
The fraction of a percent of internet-capable individuals who now publish blogs will change. Soon that fraction of a percent will turn into a single digit representation of those with internet access. It's difficult to predict how many browsers will become publishers given that there are an infinite range of personalities involved here. Some are extroverts who want everyone to witness the world through their eyes; others are exhibitionists who want nothing better than an audience; some are proponents of a particular view who want converts and have no qualms about standing on that stage in front of strangers. Others, though, are reluctant to reveal their private thoughts. There are the introverts who read but won't talk to strangers in a public setting. Others may be intimidated by the concept of their thoughts being read by someone on the other side of the planet who may actually "talk" back. The one surety we can bank on, though, is that the concept of personal blogging will continue to evolve and the numbers of players will continue to grow.
The Sociological Component
Which brings up the sociological component of the equation. Where are we headed as a people if we continue to publish our lives for any and all to read or participate in? Does this portend a new kind of "public?" I'd venture the answer is yes. Among the elements responsible for the eventual fall of the Soviet empire and its Iron Curtain was the access to information from outside that Iron Curtain by those confined behind it. No, it wasn't Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America. It was the videotape cassette which was smuggled into country after country, winding up in the hands of citizen after citizen. These video tapes showed the Iron Curtain citizens that the view of the world they were being shown on State Television and in State Cinema was only "one" view of the world. There were a thousand other views from tapes sent to family and friends by individuals all over the globe. These included tapes of commercial programs, tapes of news programs, but even more than that, tapes of personal experiences by individuals living in countries not subject to the Soviet "right-think." Eventually there developed an underground of information, supplanted in the latter days of the Soviet Empire by internet postings (mostly old-style bulletin board systems). This underground proved to be resilient to the State efforts to discredit the information because it came from trusted sources - friends and family of the citizens inside the Iron Curtain.
It's not enough to suggest that "information wants to be free," one must look further and deeper into what that means to understand the underlying power of "real" information. Information is what we get from others - in person and through our senses. We grow up with a sense of information assessment by being taught that certain sources are "valid" or "trusted" or "know what they're talking about." This starts at the earliest ages with parents telling their children that "so and so" might be full of mush and don't believe anything they say. This continues through our education - no matter where we are educated. Eventually, we - us humans - wind up with an internal list of sources we rely on for valuable information and other sources we may dispute or outright disbelieve. Because the evolution of communications now involves a personal transmission of information via cell phone, via Blackberry, via any device really, and because the information can be received in real time (phone or pager) or browsed at leisure (web, voice mail, email), we now have access to information which can be retrieved at our convenience. But, we also have information which can be sourced from "trusted" voices. Email we receive from a long-standing friend or relative might contain data about something pertinent to our lives and because of the value of the communications source, we treat that data differently than we might treat the same data from a neutral or suspect source.
This places us in the interesting position of being able to read "the news" from a known source such as the New York Times or Washington Post or CNN and being able to query a news item to someone we might know personally who has direct access to the same event or information. Following the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001, I published three daily letters to a listing of friends and family via email. My postings took issue with some of the published reports appearing in the online pages of the WashPost and NYTimes and others. My reason for writing these articles and posting them was because I knew that I had a different perspective and a different "take" on the events from those which I was reading in the regular papers and that those same papers were distorting what I considered to be intrinsic facts with regard to the events in Washington, DC, and the impact on the local population. Because I sent this email to friends who had known me for a number of years and to family members, I knew that my view of events would have at least an equal credibility factor to that presented by the online papers and I wanted my friends and family to have another view. This was a deliberate use of the credibility factor associated with personal knowledge of someone to provide a different view of the world. These friends and family could gauge themselves as to whether or not my comments were valid based on their knowledge of me and my trustworthiness to them. They might "trust" the NYTimes or WashPost for something where they had no other choice, but given a choice between those publications and someone they personally knew, there is a likelihood that they would look to the person they know for a more informed view.
This is where blogs have an advantage over the existing media universe. Bloggers are known to at least some individuals. Yes, a newspaper reporter may be known to some individuals also, but those reading online publications and blogs now have a choice of valid reference points when they read about an event. The fact that there are millions of bloggers publishing daily means that on any given day an event of some import - as reported by an online media service - will also likely be known by someone who publishes a blog. There are now at least two choices for a source of news with respect to both "important" and "less important" events - the official reportage as published by the media outlets and the equally "official" reportage as published by an individual with local knowledge who runs a blog.
We've seen the effects of the use of blogs in the candidacy of Howard Dean. We've also seen the effects of blogs and email in the rise of organizations such as MoveOn and American Progress Fund (both very liberal). Even Michael Moore now runs a blog, but then so do Moby and Wil Wheaton.
In fact, if you're curious about someone, Google their name and see what happens. This is one of the sociological implications of blogging. There are now a huge number of individuals who have a wide and deep return when you Google their name. Not only that, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM are all involved in advanced search projects which would return linked data-sets based on query terms. Think about this. If I were to enter your house and give you a word - say "banana," how many items could you retrieve which were relevant to that word as a search query? You might have a bunch of bananas, you might have vanilla wafers which are used to make banana pudding, you certainly have an oven and probably a mixer and a set of mixing bowls, you probably have at least one cookbook. You might have a loaf of banana-nut bread or maybe a picture which includes a monkey eating a banana. You might have a bunch of clothes from the Banana Republic. How many items would be returned from such a simple query term? This is the project these companies have embarked on - all individually - to return "sets" of relevant data based on your search term. Now stretch your imagination and apply this technology to the world wide web. Imagine if you are looking for information about a park campground and you enter the park name and the word campground. With the possibility that others might have camped there and blogged about it and the probability that the park management organization (state or private) also has a regular web page, you might get higher ranked results from the personal experience blogs than from the professional website. That, of course, might be exactly what you're looking for - and then again, it might not.
Technology and sociology mingle in the arena of search engines. We've become accustomed to using the web for everything from TV Guide to the weather to making online airplane and hotel and park reservations. We've also become accustomed to using the web to find relevant instances of advice from others who may have preceded us on some adventure. This is possible to do today but will be much more likely to be the norm following the efforts of Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and IBM. And, given the ease of publishing a blog, there's a possibility that the advanced search technologies might themselves engender a new wave of publishing from those who have those relevant experiences and wish to share them with others. How much easier might it be to track down one's distant cousins or half-brothers or step-sisters with advanced search capabilities and more and more individuals publishing their lives online?
Positive versus Negative Aspects
These are the positive elements of the blog revolution. There are also the negative elements. How many times have you said something in the company of someone you later thought might be the "wrong" person to overhear some remark you made. How likely is that remark to be published for others to read about it in the future? More likely than you might think. We already live in a world where our activities in public spaces are as likely to be captured on some security video camera than not. When you extract money from an ATM machine, when you enter a drugstore or supermarket, even when you pay a toll at a highway booth, your actions are either recorded on video or snapshotted by some digital apparatus. Even your license plate is now the subject of still digital image taking in a great many cities and on a great number of highways. Our lives in public spaces are now even more public than we may wish. The web is filled with images taken from security cameras which reveal - in a distant location or vehicle - a couple engaged in hot and heavy private activities. Did that couple expect their private moments to be captured forever by some distant security camera? Probably not. As email and web use at work places has become more and more tracked by third-party individuals or organizations paid to determine appropriate use, we have moved to a more learned use of that technology in the work place. We no longer - or at least we should no longer - expect privacy for our use of email and web browsing in the work place. Our actions in the public sphere - in parks, in parked cars in public lots, behind boardwalk moorings at the beach, in a corner in a department store - are no longer of a nature that we could classify as "private." If we're doing something in a public space, chances are very likely that there is going to be a digital (or analog) record of our activities somewhere.
With more cell phones with built-in cameras, with more use of digital cameras, with the ease with which something can and is published online these days, our actions in public spaces are now subject to both "official" digital recording and to "unofficial, private" recording by individuals. Blogs are already replete with images of others taken in public spaces. There is no "permission to reproduce" form which these bloggers request an individual to fill out. No, there is simply this expectation that if one is in public, one's actions and activities can and probably will be recorded by someone and probably also published online for any and all to peruse. This makes the most profound negative element of blogging the universal loss of privacy of everyone in a public space, not to mention the publication of private moments as mentioned earlier. There are a number of laws on the books in a variety of states and countries already which prohibit the use of digital cameras or camera-equipped cell phones to take inappropriate images of individuals. By inappropriate, most of these laws stipulate prohibitions against their use in "bathrooms" or other locations of expected privacy. These laws are not universal, though, and they do not cover all instances of what might be considered "private" situations. It's a shame, but a lot of individuals choose or are forced into situations where their most private, aggrieved, moments are, in fact, in a very public space. How many times does one find an individual sobbing uncontrollably in a park on a bench, or in a car in a parking lot, or even in a shopping center on the one bench set aside from the others along the main walkway? These individuals are having very private moments and they may not have chosen that location for their moment of grief or extreme sadness, but there they are looking very forlorn and tender and vulnerable. By being in a public space they are subject to being the object of some bloggers comments or some blogging photographer's image gallery.
Is this fair? Is this legal? Is this in keeping with our social contract? It is probably not fair. It is, for the most part, perfectly legal in most instances and in most locations today. It may be a question of pertinence with respect to our social contract. When is there an expectation of privacy in a public arena? A couple making out in a movie theater may believe they are in a private location but in legal terms they are in a public space. In terms of the social contract, there are probably a larger number of individuals who would say it would be better for them to make out in their apartment than in a movie theater.
The evolving record of our planet, of our lives, by the bloggers and blogging photographers is a continuing story of the capture of many private moments. How should we deal with this drama. Should we be "less" public when we're in public spaces, and by this I mean, should we act in more restrained manners, masking our emotions, our glee, our joy and our griefs? Should we accept that our lives are part of a grander society and that when we engage in public activities with that society that our lives become part of the permanent record of that society - for better or worse?
Certainly for those who are extroverts, exhibitionists, or who have pretenses towards acting or public debate, these individuals will probably not be concerned that their activities are caught by others, nor are they probably concerned that their actions and activities may be seen by individuals not physically present. We already have a precedent for public disclosure of very private moments with the success and popularity of television programs such as "Funniest Home Videos." And, television has also given us the daytime talk and audience participation programs where "husbands who sleep with the mothers of their wives" and other outrageous personal acts are displayed and mocked. Jerry Springer may be the most outrageous or most known but his show is hardly a unique example. Or, what about "Cops" and the dozen look-alike programs such as "Most Dangerous Car Chases?" In a sense we have already provided the foundation for a relinquishing of our privacy through these programs and their success.
I'm not sure that those who worry about their privacy have even actually considered the subject matter seriously. If you make a phone call at an airport pay phone, your conversation is available for anyone nearby to hear and listen in on. Using a cell phone on a bus or in the subway or in a park is the same invitation. At thousands upon thousands of Fourth of July festivals across America, score thousand citizens of this country engage in familial activities in a most public manner. We scold our children in public, we argue with our spouses in public, we argue with neighbors on our streets, we discuss with often angry language the length of lines at check-out stands in supermarkets. We do all this in public with no expectation of privacy. What if we did all this, were captured by someone with a digital camera (or, Heaven forbid, a DV camera), and the results posted on someone's blog or website. Would we change our behavior or would we simply accept the fact that our lives are, in fact, public when we are in the public arena.
I contend that we would accept the inevitable publication of our private moments. Maybe not universally and maybe not with a great deal of comfort. But, because it wouldn't be that much different from our present environment, the reproduction of our lives on the web would not be that much of a change from today's rather public situation.
Is this Evolution?
If we're evolving in this direction - both because of past events which have led us down this path and with present and evolving technology and those who are using it - are we becoming a more public species? Are our lives such that they are a permanent element of the history of the planet? Yes. They are. A powerful example of this is the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Family members of individuals who were killed by the Nazi's can use the Museum's library and find any and all instances of record about their lost relative, using elaborate, digitally-converted, records and artifacts. Sitting down at a computer console, a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp, or the surviving family member, can search a relative or friend and find whatever might be the electronic remains of that individual's life. Letters, digitized, photographs, digitized, a compilation of the orders the Nazi's used to transport the person, whatever there is that is a record of that individual's life is available for the survivor to view. It's an attempt to personalize the lives of those who were lost and to provide a memento to those who survive. In a very real sense, these digital records are the family heirlooms for a huge number of survivors. Certainly, Ken Burns was able to capture the personalities and some element of the lives of those who fought in the Civil War by showing photographs and assembling a collection of letters home from some of the soldiers. Has their privacy been invaded? Probably. Is there some social goodness factor which allows this privacy factor to be overridden? Yes. The lives of those who came after are enriched by these disclosures from the private lives of these individuals.
This becomes a philosophical as well as sociological question at this point. Our lives are lived out in a public arena - we share our space with others in our community. Our communities share their existence temporally with other communities. Was the trial in Laramie, Wyoming, over the death of Matthew Shepard and the subsequent PBS re-enactment of that event a public disclosure of the private lives of a significant number of Laramie residents? Yes. Was it a worthy thing to do? Yes. Because it showed what happens to a town when a few individuals who are part of that community do something which the world at large views as heinous, and, it shows what members of that community went through and where their society evolved - or has not yet. Their actions were done in a public arena and capturing those activities was no breach of privacy. Those who went further and revealed their private thoughts and consternations and fears and hopes did so with the expectation that others might learn from their mistakes.
So it is with blogs. We have a few individuals now who might be breaching some fine line in the sand which differentiates what is truly private from what is accepted as public. These individuals are taking a chance of being castigated or ignored. But, they are also showing the rest of those reading and publishing on the internet that there is something to be gained from merging the private with the public. As we grow into a global species we will need knowledge and experience from those whose experiences are completely different from ours. We might get these through visiting troupes, or through the cinema, or from existing media presentations. Our faith and our trust in these established outlets may range from complete to not-at-all. We may also view those who present a foreign view with suspicion, even if they are native to that view. But, we stand a greater chance of growing as a species if we have more voices from more different viewpoints. The world of blogging allows the distribution of a vast universe of new and different voices and viewpoints and it allows us to participate in the lives of others we don't know. We can vicariously see the world through a thousand other eyes and experience our own world as seen by someone whose background, experience and perspective is - perhaps - completely at odds with ours. The advantage of blogs is that they provide this new world view and do so in the most benign manner. I don't have to continue to read the journal of someone who might threaten or frighten me. There's a volition involved. If I'm interested, I can continue to read and follow the life of that individual with no personal fear that I'll ever actually run across them in real life. I can comment and begin a dialog or I can "lurk" and simply read what is going on in their mind and in their world and read the comments of others.
Laws which are presently applicable with respect to blogs involve the issues of privacy, slander, hate crimes and threats. Interestingly enough, there don't seem to be any laws proposed or applicable which do not also affect existing relationships between individuals. Blogs, then, seem to be merely the next evolution in our relationship with each other. The norms of decency and approbation will still apply. The social contract still exists - though with blogs from all over the planet now available for review - the social contract itself must be examined. We have one here in America. There's one in France, India, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Iceland, and, in fact, anywhere where there is a sovereign group of citizens. We know from the world of online pornography that different countries take a different view of what is and is not acceptable in the privacy of one's own home. We can also assume that those who blog may be a leading edge of that society's main element. We can almost certainly assume that it is the younger component of that society's population. Here in the United States, the bulk (greater than 60 percent) of the online blogs are published by individuals between 12 and 32. That makes sense as it's usually the younger set which embraces a new communications technology or sociology. Jump one generation in the future, though, and we have a planet with the bulk of the population accepting of a public life, accepting the fact that their public actions could be the meat of someone else's journal. The interesting character is no longer the individual from a novel or other fictional work. Instead, the interesting character is today's odd bus patron whose actions were caught on camera and recorded in someone else's blog.
What Should the Society Do?
There are society implications for this new evolution as well. Like the Holocaust Museum, there ought to be places where one's life can be accessed in the totality of its digital record. Not simply as the result of some Google search - even using the advanced search engines which will be here soon enough. No, there needs to be some new element of library science which looks at how to properly catalog and make available the online record of individual's lives. There are hundreds of photography blogs where the daily product is someone's digital imagery. That imagery can be of a place, of an event, of their lives, of their friends or family. No matter, the sum of these photo blogs is the visual perspective of an individual. The same is true for the text blogs, which number thousands of times greater. Over a year or several year's worth of daily or aperiodic comments, there is the sum of an individual's world view. These blogs record the ups and downs, the griefs and joys, the daily interactions and foibles of their authors. This is a sociological record of the people of Earth. It shouldn't be a situation where this record of these lives is simply "here today, gone tomorrow." This is the first time in our history where a vast number of individuals can (and do) record their perspectives. Many of these records can be cross-referenced with respect to the same event. How many New Yorkers or Washingtonians (or Marylanders or Virginians or New Jerseyites or Connecticutians) recorded their lives on September 11, 2001, and subsequently recorded their daily evolving world view afterwards. This is a record of interest to a large number of individuals, both now and perhaps even more so in the near and far future. These blogs and journals and diaries and photo records should be accessible through some form of central system. There needs to be a time-referential and place-referential system to co-locate the stories which were contemporary to the second but which might have been blocks or miles apart. This is a fantastic record we're creating but it needs to be looked at from a retrieval perspective.
Changing Our World View
For the first time ever we have an opportunity to capture the life and times of our planet. We can locate and produce a pulse for this Earth. We have millions of individuals now engaged in a reportorial activity - whether they accept that role or not they are reporting on their lives as members of the human species and they are reporting on events in their locale and the implications of those events. We need, as a population of intelligent beings, to begin to consider what to do with these records and how to get them categorized and made accessible. We also need to begin to worry about a more permanent form of storage. One of the chores I engaged in while webmaster at NASA Headquarters was to provide an archive of the NASA web for the National Archives. This was something which was requested by the Clinton Administration and which we weren't exactly all that happy to oblige. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to capture a "state of the Agency" at a period which was specific in time and which, when viewed later, would give an insight as to the comings and goings of the 25,000 or so individuals who comprised that enterprise. A gargantuan task, to be sure, but when completed, after many months of capture and encoding, was a worthy image of an exploration agency engaged in some of this planet's most exciting ventures. The same may not be true of 25,000 random and unconnected individual's web logs, journals, or diaries, but, it may. We don't know what we would capture if we gathered that many individual blogs together and linked them appropriately to each other. Appropriate would be using topical links such as simultaneity in time or proximity in space or coincidence of event.
I'm proposing that we have a vast and valuable resource in these personal blogs and that we should, as a species, begin to explore how we might make better use of these resources. I would also propose that anyone who operates a blog take a look at their past product and consider making PDF snapshots by day or week or month, or begin to assemble sets of entries by topic. Most blogging software allows for some form of archival activity, some software products allow for the level of flexibility which I described. Stewart Brand began an assemblage of personalized facts with the publication in 1968 of the first "Whole Earth Catalog." Brand has gone on to many more interesting projects in the meantime (Google him). A blog inventory and categorization and accessibility project involving our best and most advanced concepts of both search technology and library science would be an appropriate activity for these times - nearly 40 years after that first Whole Earth Catalog and potentially two generations removed from those heady hippy days of yore.
I'll be evolving these thoughts through the next several years. I'll be attempting some of what I've proposed using my own blog as the resource. For instance, in my explorations of Seattle, the Northwest, and North America, I've made numerous entries crossing back and forth through some of the same topics time and again. One easy project for me would be to abstract those topical entries and compile them under headings associated with each topic. Since most of what I've documented has also been accompanied by digital imagery, I'd have to include that imagery in any compilation. I've written close to two million words in a single year and published close to a thousand images. That's a huge record of "something." By compiling the topical entries, I reduce the random data to accessible topical knowledge sets. To what end? Knowledge distribution. We need more of it. With the billions of words being published daily by millions of bloggers there's every likelihood that vast knowledge sets exist. Think about it.
Post Script
All references to empirical data or citations with "facts" were verified by multiple searches using Google or Yahoo, or typically, both. References which stipulate hard data were cross-referenced using web-based resources to ensure the validity of the data through more than a single source. Nearly any instance of a fact or data set referenced in this essay can be reproduced using appropriate query terms through either Yahoo or Google search engines.
The impetus for this essay was the realization that once again we, the human species, are at the threshold of a new era. This new era will be one where individuals are connected through remote but live telecommunications channels which include the personal journal, diary, or blog, and ,which, more often than not, have digital imagery enhancing the information. How we evolve in this new era is of interest to me from a sociological, technological, anthropological, and philosophical perspective. My entire life has been one of personal involvement with the content, technology, and implications of information dissemination. My personal heroes are René Descartes, Charles Darwin, Loren Eiseley and Rod Serling. I believe in active evolution - that is we can evolve ourselves and our species by conscious and willful effort. We are at a moment in the evolution of our species where willful and thoughtful activity towards our future is at a tremendous leverage advantage. As a species, this is the first generation where global communication with our kind is possible. It's important that we approach that capability collectively and equally important that we begin to think about our species as cohesive. The days of the tribe are numbered. What follows tribalism is ours to determine, collectively and individually.
For an interesting, OTHER, view on this same topic matter, see <http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/ols-master.html>. It's a Flash presentation looking back from a point in time a decade ahead - 2014. Worth your while, it's about seven minutes long, a lot shorter than getting to this point in this essay!
We have the cave drawings in France from 20,000 years ago. In fact, pretty nearly everywhere we look or dig or uncover we - humans - find evidence that our forebears, our not-quite-evolved ancestors, were of the sort that they wanted to record their thoughts, impressions, fears, wonders, wants, and aspirations.
One of the standard definitions of our species is that we're "tool makers." But that's not quite broad enough because the great apes also make tools as do other species. Another definition is that we "bury our dead" or otherwise commemorate their departure. But that's not quite right either because elephants gather at the site of a deceased member and spend a great number of days wailing and bemoaning the lost one. Dogs of certain breeds and wolves do the same, though for a shorter period. The simians have been observed doing elaborate rituals when a member of a clan dies. And mothers of all species go through elaborate "loss" rituals suggesting that humans are simply not alone in recognizing the "gone" nature of a soul.
So what is it, really, which distinguishes us as a species? I believe it's the "recording" of our lives. Not simply the "marking" of territory or the construction of permanent or semi-permanent dwellings. Species after species do these things but to my knowledge no other species creates its own history with constructs - words, art, structures. We do. These are the trappings of what it is that truly distinguishes us from the other creatures and that is our self-consciousness. It's probable that the cetaceans are also self-aware in perhaps the same way, they do, after all, create these wonderful songs. One might even successfully argue that a host of other mammals and perhaps a number of birds and reptiles also have self-consciousness. But, even if this were true, the only species to document that self-consciousness is us humans. We create our history and record it. We document our actions, our thoughts, our aspirations.
A quick search on Google will reveal that journals and diaries have been around since Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece - in that order. See <http://www.pomona.edu/Magazine/pcmsu00/1.shtml> for a discussion on the rise of writing in the proto-humans; see <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/magazine/19PHENOM.html?oref=login&oref=login> (free registration required) for a discussion on the implied and oftimes negative impact of today's blogs and the lack of an evolved ethic. On the distinctions between journals and diaries, I offer this abstract from a homeopathic site which advises using journals or diaries or both for their considerable self-healing properties:
HISTORY OF THE DIARY AND JOURNAL
Diaries:
Writing has been a part of man's experiences since the crude cave paintings and the hieroglyphics of the ancients. Diaries and journals have been in use for centuries, some of the earliest of them from Japanese works such as "The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu" (AD 978- ) "The Sarashina Diary" (AD 1009-1059) though much earlier texts have been written and preserved from various parts of the world. One such account is the 'royal diary' of Cleopatra (69-30 BC). Other royal leaders such as Tutankhamen left a tale with a mystery to end its story (1000 BC). One of the world's earliest known civilizations, Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia established and have been credited with inventing writing around (3500 BC). One legendary king who was named Gilgamesh or Uruk (2700 BC) seems to have one of the world's oldest known written stories -- a mythological account of Gilgamesh's search for immortality, "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The histories of royal families have been kept since the time they first appeared as rulers throughout the world.
Journals:
The ancient scribes left their mark in the world with the written word. It was they who left eyewitness testimony of their time and and place while here on earth. But, it was the Greek astronomers who took great interest in observing the cosmos by recording movement through the heavens and plot their paths over time. Their daily logs, called "ephides," contributed to the success of predicting the behavior of the stars and planets from year to year. These "ephides" became the basis for further studies in astronomy and the concept of a daily ongoing narrative–the journal was born.
The topic here is what do I think is happening in this new realm and what have I discerned about this realm from participating and observing now for the relatively short period of just over a year. Additional resources might be useful at this point and here are a few which I use:
Technorati - <http://www.technorati.com/> a San Francisco-based "blog" search engine and ranking service. This abstract from their "about" statement says enough to give you the picture:
Today, Technorati tracks almost five million weblogs, up from 100,000 two years ago. The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.
Technorati displays what's important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place. Technorati makes it possible for you to find out what people on the Internet are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics, or other areas of interest — all in real time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting. Technorati provides a live view of the global conversation of the Web.
Editor's note: The URL for the Pew Internet study is: <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/144/report_display.asp>.
Blogdex - <http://blogdex.net/> a Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Media Lab-based relative ranking engine which tracks blog cross links. This abstract from their "about" statement will give you an idea of what it's about:
Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory <http://www.media.mit.edu/> tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.
Blogdex uses the links made by webloggers as a proxy to the things they are talking about. Webloggers typically contextualize their writing with hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects they are discussing. These markers are like tags placed on wild animals, allowing Blogdex to track a piece of conversation as it moves from weblog to weblog.
A couple of other resources that are also useful. This one tracks the blogs in the Metro Washington DC area - <http://www.reenhead.com/map/listversion.htm>; this one tracks the blogs in the Metro Seattle area - <http://seablogs.hellbent.org/>; Eatonweb Portal <http://portal.eatonweb.com/> is a compendium of blogs assembled by submission and reference, so is incomplete, but at least has a structure to the listing - which is useful; About <http://about.com> provides a weblog section <http://weblogs.about.com/> which, in typical About manner, is useful if a bit thin; and, give those Canadians credit, one of the ISP providers for Saskatchewan, Northern Lights <http://www.lights.com>, provides a useful, top-level, listing of blog directories <http://www.lights.com/weblogs/directories.html>.
And, if all else fails, use Google <http://google.com> (or the new kid on the block, Snap <http://www.snap.com>) and search on any topic plus the word blog - or any name and the word blog. Technorati and Pew Research variously estimate between 5 and 13 million blogs being published in the United States (including the territories, possessions, 50 states, DC, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico) and between 20 and 70 million worldwide (which includes the US). These same "authorities" also postulate that the number of online individuals who read these blogs numbers from 20 million in the US to 90 million elsewhere for a worldwide readership of an estimated 110 million internet users. The Central Intelligence Agency's World Fact Book <http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/> estimates that there are roughly one billion online citizens on this planet - that's all countries. Some, of course, are more wired than others, but even Zimbabwe is shown to have 100,000 regular internet users and the number of Americans is estimated to be 136.5 million for "home" use, with an estimated 185.55 million including home and office access. That means that nearly one sixth of the living inhabitants of this planet have some form of internet access. Earth human population as of December, 2004, was estimated to be 6.4 billion by the US Bureau of the Census. So what have we got, then, with respect to online diaries, journals and blogs? Fifteen percent of humans have internet access, 1.7 percent of humans read blogs, and less than one percent of humans write or post blogs. That's if we use the upper numbers from the Technorati and Pew Research estimates. If we use the lower numbers, the readership stays pretty much the same at 1.7 percent of the total planetary population, but the authorship number slips to three-hundredths of a percent. Although that's not insignificant, given the population of the planet, it is vanishingly small as a creative component of the total population dynamics.
Whlch leads us to this conclusion about the current electronic state of journal-and-diary publishing - it is a recent and new endeavor which is being engaged by a fraction of those who have the basic technical capabilities. The earliest blogs were actually the website directories being published in 1992-93 by CERN and NCSA as part of the then-evolving web browser and HTTP universe. Classic weblogging (of the sort we see today) appears to have begun in earnest in 1999 using new software, which at that time, enabled the automatic posting of text and images with a tracking system for commenting and maintaining live links to web-based material which was moving about in the directories of the home servers. Userland Frontier and its kin were in those first generations of content-management and publishing tools. Today, there are at least half-a-dozen server-side tools which do essentially the same thing, including the Userland software suite. There are also nearly a dozen free-hosting services which provide the basic functionality of these tools to users such as Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and even Microsoft's new MSN Spaces. Like all new tricks, there is a lot of development going on for what certainly is a fraction of the potential market or audience. in that sense, anyone blogging today is still in the forefront of the evolution of both the technical elements and the sociological elements.
It's the sociological elements which I will try my hand at analyzing in this piece.
I've noticed a variety of styles and content on these millions of blogs. And, to be sure, a blog is different than a journal or a diary. In fact, some existing websites have begun to resemble blogs. Websites which contain sections allowing for conversational threads such as Slashdot <http://slashdot.org> or sites like ESPN <http://espn.com> which have message boards produce the same result as if they were blogs. Many sites of authors or artists or even politicians contain sections where visitors can engage in a threaded discussion. In a sense, the web has evolved into a communal participatory village green with blogs being the latest incarnation of what might formerly have been the corner store, village parlor, local pub, or even bully pulpit.
Of the formal blogs, websites which use "blogging" software or servers and have the express purpose of serving as a blog, there breaks down a litany of categories which, to a degree, represent the current human universe of interests. There are blogs on cooking, sports, politics (of all flavors and colors), regions, interests, and persuasions. There are blogs which cover the news from any and all political bent and there are blogs which cover the many elements of a religious life for all the world's religions. These are categorical blogs and their existence is no different than the previous incarnation of this phenomenon in the last evolution of human communication - magazines and newsletters. Anyone with an interest in even an obscure pastime or hobby or profession can find at least one and often a variety of publications to subscribe to, most with a "letters" or "comments" forum which further engages that unique audience. The evolution of the web has allowed these multitudinous interest groups to maintain and enhance their connectivity and cohesion by reducing the time lag between these communications. Whereas previously a magazine or newsletter might have a weekly, monthly, quarterly or aperiodic publication schedule, the new blog covering the same topical area has a publication frequency of minutes or hours and certainly no less frequently than days.
This has certainly provided a useful and necessary forum for the evolution of technology. Particularly so with respect to the web itself and the machines which both run and browse the web. It would be difficult to imagine a world today where a Microsoft or Apple or Sun or HP didn't have an online forum for users of their software or a third-party website where users of that software could exchange ideas, share problem fixes and discuss issues associated with the use of a vendor's products. These sites are among the most popular elements of the web.
At the same time, the use of the web for personal perspective publishing has enhanced our access to not only raw information but also the enhanced information and knowledge which others have on everything from specific topics to generalized awareness. In the eleventh century in China, during the Ch'ing-li Period, a commoner named Pi Sheng used the first "movable type" to produce a book. The type was created in clay, fired, and placed in a form upon which was the printing press. In the fifteen century, Johannes Gutenberg recreated that technology using a modified wine press in Mainz, Germany, and the East and West worlds have not been the same since. And, like Pi-Sheng's or Gutenberg's printing press, other evolutions have dramatically altered the human communications landscape. The introduction of the telegraph and later the telephone erased distance and time from human interaction in ways which could not have been foreseen. More lately, the world wide web and the subsequent proliferation of cellular telephone technology and the consequent combination of the two with the added advantage of built-in cellular camera capabilities into instant web publishing has made our planet smaller than anyone could have imagined and possibly smaller than most would like.
With one billion humans online and somewhere between 20 and 70 million online publishers, what is actually going on? Clearly most of them are publishing from a specific perspective. The political, sport, hobbyist, or single-flavor blogs are published from the perspective of that political view, that sport, that hobby, or that single-flavor (as in the Red Corvette blog, or the Canon EOS blog, or the new mother blog, et al.). Once you begin to subtract the Technorati Top 100 (and subsequent "next 5,000") and remove the "new" blogs, the political blogs, the single-topic - single-flavor blogs, the associated blog-like websites (like Slashdot, ESPN, and others of that ilk), one is left with a still-large variety of what wind up being "personal" blogs.
These personal blogs take a variety of shapes and forms. There's those which allow for comments and which engender threads through the comments section. There are others which allow for comments but which are positioned in such a way (either through choice or limitations of the software being used - either deliberately or as a side-effect) that threaded discussions cannot occur. Then there are those for which no comments are possible. They merely describe the deliberative or conversational aspects of these "personal" blogs.
From the reduced set of blogs left (once the ones cited have been removed from the universe of blogs), we have an odd view into the personal lives of those publishing these journals, diaries or "blogs." A huge subset of these personal blogs are apparently being published as if they were diaries. That is, they recount the inner thoughts, feelings, wants, joys and sorrows of the publisher. These could be the work of individuals who are exhibitionistic in nature or who are shy in person but less shy when once-removed by means of the electronic publishing of a diary-blog. There are a fair number of these and they range from the timid and tepid to the near sordid and salacious (as in publishing the author's opinion of the previous evening's date and after-date bed-time activities). Many of these name names and otherwise spell out what would normally be very private aspects of their and other people's lives. In some instances these diary-blogs have already created legal issues whereby an individual cited in another person's blog has sued for defamation or violations of privacy. Since there are no recognized hard and fast rules with respect to these types of blogs, the development of case law in these instances will engender a form of near-term, legally-binding "codas" which will be overlaid on the existing and unfettered freedoms of the diarist-blogger. Of course, this is as it should be because even under today's existing legal strictures one cannot defame or otherwise impugn the reputation of someone for purely personal reasons and not expect some form or personal or legal retribution; nor can one disclose acts or actions or the discourse from what would be construed as "private" moments in a public forum without the same expectation of legal or personal retribution. These kinds of blogs range the gamut from, as mentioned, those which "name" names to those which offer a tremendous degree of circumspect distance to those mentioned. Some blogs merely cite "friend" or "lover" or "date" or "family member" without being any more specific than that and yet still reveal the author's innermost thoughts and personal views with respect to those cited.
These kinds of blogs are the ones which get news mention by the regular media and which, because they are exploring a new realm of disclosure with respect to privacy issues, will be the ones to watch with respect to setting standards and/or causing standards and laws to be set or enacted. This is a relatively new phenomenon because, although there have been exhibitionists and "disclosers" in previous generations of communications technology and sociology, there has never previously been as wide nor as "foreign" or unknown an audience as there is now for these electronic publications. There are technical methods whereby a blog can be restricted to a set of individuals - through password protection and access limitations. It's not clear, though, that the publishers of these kinds of blogs are really trying to protect anyone. It seems, to me at least, that these individuals are exploring a new form of "public" reality. A public reality where the private elements of one's life are displayed, discussed, and acted out on a public stage populated by strangers. That may be part of the allure for some and it may be an inadvertent consequence for others who don't realize the extent of access to their public disclosures. Nor do all who engage in blogging understand that there is an implied pact between individuals when issues of a personal or private nature are discussed. The implied pact is one where an individual expects to be notified if something disclosed in private is further distributed or disclosed to a larger audience. One might say that it is a common courtesy except that in the world of the web, in the new and burgeoning world of online personal publishing, there is no acceptance of a common set of courtesies. More often than not the author of a blog will state up front that "it's my blog and I can say what I want." Which implies that they can and will disclose private comments or events which occurred in private between them and one or more other individuals.
The natural and resulting consequences from such discourteous actions are that the individual publishing these kinds of comments and disclosing private moments with others will be shunned or dropped as friends by those whose privacy is felt to be invaded. So, perhaps there is a limiting degree of damage which these types of blogs can induce. There are already a series of consequences from the publication of private data by a Washington, DC-based personal diarist. In the case of some mentioned, they lost their jobs, in the case of the individual whose blog was the avenue of disclosure, she lost her job, lost her friends, and has lost her credibility. But, not before she brought a number of other individuals down with her. These results become even more unpredictable now that we have cellphones with built-in cameras and keypads which can be linked live to an automated blogging system. Of course, as in all instances of personal conduct, it's a question of trust and honesty. Don't go blabbing state secrets in your bedroom to someone who publishes a web log, or, if you do, expect the worse.
There are at least two more distinctive kinds of personal blog that I've run across. There's the blog which is a series of unlinked and seemingly random thoughts and comments and there are the blogs which are pretty close to and akin to the journals which an individual might have kept in the days of pen and ink. The random-event blogs are ones where the author lists a series of events, comments, or observations, all unlinked except that they occurred to the author of the blog. They cover the gamut from personal to professional to political to observations of human nature. These kinds of blogs generally solicit comment and generally support the threaded discussion format because, as often as not, a particular comment or observation will be one which strikes a universal chord in a segment of the readership of that blog. Threaded discussions show an originating comment and all subsequent comments which rejoin the original poster's comment. Threading technology has allowed web sites as well as blogs to develop a following along very specific topical lines and allows the casual observer to follow a discussion in minutes which may have taken days to occur in real time. And, because search engines such as Yahoo and Google now "crawl" the web on a continuous basis, the contents of an electronic author (blogger) on some obscure element of human nature is now categorized and linked to the rest of the web through the search term text box. Searching for any manner of random human event these days will result in several dozen to hundred "hits" with at least a fraction of those hits being the personal output of a single web log author. In the grandest sense possible, we are now linked to the observations and comments of those surrounding us - at least the one-sixth of the planet which has access to the web. The interesting component of this link is that an individual does not have to be an author of a web log, doesn't have to own a website or have a personal domain to have one's comments be captured by a Yahoo or Google search engine. Simply commenting on someone else's website or blog will result in that comment being tagged and tracked with respect to subject matter. In that sense there is no longer any real expectation of anonymity when yelling out a response in a crowd - at least if the yelling is on the web and the crowd is the comment section of a weblog. These kinds of blogs provide a daily capitulation of what's interesting, unique, or oddball about our world and these oddball comments are being accrued and sorted and categorized by some of the largest online systems imaginable. Forget the CIA or the folks at Ft. Meade, it's the Google search engine which is listening in to your online comments. Maybe not to the comments you make using an iChat or AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger, but to those comments you might post to that website bulletin board discussing the Washington Redskins, or the Canadiens, or the Yankees, or a whole different set of websites pertaining to the Libertarian Party or Howard Dean, or even the use of specific hops by home beer brewers or the best chocolate to use in a mousse. The search engines crawl everywhere and it's still not clear that the millions of web users here and elsewhere realize this to the degree that they should. All comments posted in a public forum - and a website's discussion board and the contents and comments sections of blogs are public forums - are "public." That means anyone and everyone might, can or does access them. Again, it's the public nature of this which needs a deeper look.
There are also the "journals," these are blogs where the individual authors take the reader on some form of journey, either an exploration in a space or an exploration in a time. Think of these blogs as the modern equivalent of the Lewis and Clark journals, or of Darwin's journal, or any other writing of that sort. Many of them are in the form of travelogs and follow an individual around as he or she explores their world, oftimes while island hopping or continent-traipsing, either through Europe, Australia, Asia or even North America. One recent example of this was a couple's adventure on the road for one-hundred-and-one days to see as many states and provinces as they could in one single road trip. Each day they reported where they were, what they ate, how they viewed the residents and artifacts of where they were and what that "place" and "people" did to them insofar as their frame of mind, their spirituality, their zeitgeist. There was one finished this time two years ago which followed the exploits of a Chicago blue-collar worker who lived in Indiana and wanted to take his Harley-Davidson on a ride to the furthest place where roads exist in North America. It was a seven-week excursion with his comments on the day's activities, what he saw, what he photographed (he used silver-based film so had no "live" images), how he was treated, and, because he was on a motorcycle, the condition of the road as he ventured farther and farther north above Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. These kinds of journals - blogs - are fascinating because they allow the reader to vicariously experience new spaces, new people, and with the benefit of imagery, to actually see some of what is being described. The authors of these journals generally give a bit of reference with respect to who they are, what their expectations are at the outset, how they have equipped themselves, and what sorts of experiences leave them in what state of mind or mood. Through this type of background, one can acquire a sense of perspective to the writing and with one's own personal "windage" follow along in a relatively easy manner but still acquire a deep sense of the adventure the author has set out upon.
These kinds of blogs, the journal blogs, can range from the fast-paced, as with the 101-day tour of North America, to the harrowing, as with the Harley guy from Indiana who nearly lost it several times on the muddy roads of the Yukon, to the slower-paced and more deliberate wherein an individual explores things more close at hand and in more depth, providing some additional background and history gleaned from library or web research such as the blogs of the home-brew electronic music artists. My journal (the web version of these email texts) is such a blog. It explores my continuing understanding of North America and more specifically my deepening knowledge of Seattle, the Puget Sound region, and the Northwest in general. But, it has other dimensions. My journal explores the impact of the evolution of communications technologies on the sociology of humans and attempts to understand the evolution of the modern, 20th and 21st Century urban environment.
Of the personal blogs, which are probably less than a quarter of the total blogosphere (as the universe of blogs has been nicknamed), the breakdown seems to be as follows (without statistical reference, this is based on my observation over time):
1) The personal exposition-diary type blogs seem to represent about fifty percent of the available or cross-linked blogs. These blogs have a common feature in the listing of URLs for associated friends or other blogs the author follows on a regular basis. The software available for blogging encourages this type of linking. Many of these blogs also identify which other blogs have provided "trackbacks," or links back to the author's blog. In the purest sense of the word, these blogs are self-referential and in an interesting offshoot to the concept of the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon," these blogs can lead through a path of blogs right back to the originating blog. A great many of these personal diaries encourage and facilitate the use of threaded comments;
2) The random-event, non-sequential type blogs appear to represent about a quarter of the personal blogs. These too, contain references to other random-event, non-sequential blogs and through the use of these embedded links one can explore a vast universe of truly unusual or unique events and happenings on a daily basis. These kinds of blogs also use the trackback capabilities and many of them also use the threaded comment features to further solicit random event citings and references;
3) The journal-style blogs also seem to represent the last quarter of the personal blogosphere with the difference being that many of the journal style blogs do not necessarily encourage either comments, or if they do accept comments, the threaded discussion format. Much of the journal style of blog appears to be an exposition form of writing rather than an ad hoc or extemporaneous style which the diary type and random-event type seem to be. Which is to say that the diary style and random-event style blogs seem more often to consist of pithy and short comments strung together over a period of a few hours and often updated within the same day. The journal style blogs seem more like essays assembled on a schedule or associated with a schedule and less extemporaneous in content and approach.
Some of the journal-style blogs follow the actions or events associated with a "time" rather than with a "space." Such examples are the blogs kept by individuals living with someone who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease or who might have been diagnosed themselves with a form of cancer. Some of these journals follow a couple as they go through the nine months of a pregnancy and the birthing of a child and the first months to years of that child's life. Although at first glance these kinds of blogs may seem more like diaries they are journals because they identify a theme and provide a foundation for that theme and build upon that theme to some higher knowledge or subsequent event or action.
Realize that all of these published, online, personal stories and events and recountings still represent a few hundredths-of-a-percent of the existing population of this planet. Now the question of what the consequences of these blogs might be and where we might be going as a society of humans becomes a more interesting and more difficult question. If this richness of personal stories, these deep and well-written (in a large number of instances) journal and diary entries is such at this ratio of authors-to-planetary population, what will happen when the ratio of authors-to-planetary population approaches one-to-one?
Implications of Blogs on Technology, Sociology, the Law, and Us - the People
We can draw some parallels from the recent past. It took nearly 20 years for television to become ubiquitous throughout the industrialized world and another ten for the remainder of the planet. It took only 10 years from the first satellite-based cable channels to today's world of a satellite-cable-linked planet. It took only five years from the earliest days of modern, small, cellphones to the near-ubiquity of these devices today. It's true, cell phones have been around longer but the first decade they were little more than portable radio transmitters recalling their brethren from WWII in size and usefulness. With the advent of MCI and the breakup of Ma Bell in the early 1980's, the cachet of "long distance" began to disappear. No longer did anyone run to pick up the phone when someone said "long distance calling." Today, the concept of long distance is almost as quaint as the notion of receiving a telegram. And, with the increasing rate reduction and special plans available for foreign country access, the notion of international dialing is also approaching quaintness. It will not be long before webphones make serious inroads into international long distance. Once that happens, the telecommunication carriers will follow suite as they have in the past and international phone rates will tumble. Voice-Over-IP (webphone) is a technology lying in wait. More than half of Americans who access the internet now do so with broadband. In the other G7 nations (classically the US, Japan, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada), the percentage of broadband users to total internet users is greater than 50 percent.
When we consider the fact that 100,000 of the 12 million citizens of Zimbabwe have internet and use it we begin to see the path of this technological revolution. Some countries, such as India and mainland China, have skipped whole evolutionary periods in telecommunications and jumped directly from a situation of less than one percent of the population having wired phone systems (based on central exchanges) to a situation now where 300 million Chinese, or 20 percent of the population, have cell phones. Forty-four million Indians have cell phones. In the US, roughly 50 percent of the population has a cell phone. In Europe, that number is between 60 and 70 percent. Cellular telecommunication carriers are expanding the capabilities of their networks to the degree that a cell phone is now a cheap alternative to a home computer and browser. With blog updating and uploading now easy and possible via cell phone and with more and more cellular networks offering RSS capabilities, anyone on the planet could post a diary or journal report and have an expectation that several billions of cell phone users could download or read the contents. RSS means Real Simple Syndication and is an information protocol which allows someone to "subscribe" to another web page or blog or online set of published items.
[a technology aside - looking at information overload ]
A number of parents across both America and other countries have expressed dismay, concern, even alarm at the number of hours their children spend with video games, both console and computer-based, and both singular and online multi-participant. Many of these same parents have limited the number of hours their children may spend with their gaming equipment. Other environmental, educational, and genetic factors being favorable to the nominal development of the child, gaming offers something which these parents do not realize and which is a significant evolutionary advantage for those who are involved in gaming. Gaming provides an information-rich environment. An environment where a surfeit of data is present and yet some of the data is redundant, some of the data is irrelevant, some of the data is "non" data placed there to confuse the gamer. The gamer must select from this surfeit that data which is relevant to the gamer's present gaming environment and/or goal. This is a multi-dimensional, multi-temporal data processing requirement. The gamer, be he or she a part-time, avid, or addict gamer, spends a portion of their gaming time involved in data processing - data selection, data assessment, data assimilation, and data reduction. Gamers may not even realize the extent to which they are involved in complex data processing tasks.
This assimilation of skills associated with data processing is an intrinsic component of the gaming environment. It is intrinsic to the gaming experience. Without even considering the eye-hand coordination skills required, the eye-brain coordination skills are exceptional. This is true for the most benign of games to the most salacious and violent. The richness of the experience is in the details presented to the gamer and those details include an almost endless supply of data nuggets to be mined, examined, reduced, and potentially saved or used. This may seem obvious for puzzle-type games, but it is equally true for straight shooter games.
These data processing skills are then used intuitively in the gamer's other world - the "real" world. We are all bombarded with information - from billboards, from television and internet advertisements, from superfluous public announcements, from overheard conversations or over-the-shoulder experiences with other computer users. Many of us have a plethora of information appliances from our cell phones, our Blackberries or modern-day Newtons, our laptops, our watches, the radio or CD or XM-Sirius receiver in our cars, to the programmed babble of King County Metro bus drivers (or DC Metro subway operators). Our children are growing up in a world which is overflowing with information. How to select appropriate channels and appropriate messages and how to ignore or otherwise reduce to background noise those messages which are interference? This skill is not taught in our schools yet. It's not necessarily recognized as an issue by many (if not all) parents. And yet - gaming teaches these skills as a native component of the gaming experience.
Instead of lamenting the "lost" time individuals spend on games, instead of bemoaning the violence or salaciousness or mind-numbing moronic nature of games, instead of denying the gaming experience because of fears of brain dulling - we should be embracing gaming and identifying those games and game genres which further enrich the development of data processing skills. I'm the outlander on this argument, and yet ,not only do I have empirical proof of the value of my view (my own now-grown-up kids), I have the advantage of the intuitive proof of the concept: Games are complex; they are multivariant; they are multi-temporal, they are multi-dimensional; they provide a continuously-altering landscape with multiple planes of information. In order to be successful, one MUST become adept and adroit at information processing and data reduction.
That means that we are in the midst of a generation of individuals (well, maybe two - Gen-X and the inappropriately-named Gen-Y, the twenty-somethings and their younger siblings) who have native skills with respect to information processing which exceed our learned skills. The younger set slide seamlessly from a picture-cell phone to a blog to an online game to a research project involving multiple pages with different Google queries. And, they do it without thinking of what they are doing. I'm one of those who worries not about the fate of those much younger than me. I laud their bravado and their innate skills and their fluid use of technology as an integral component of their lives and that of their colleagues and friends.
Technological Future of Blogging
The technological future of blogging can be easily imagined - in fact it's almost pre-ordained to happen somewhat like this: More people will begin to publish journals or diaries; more cell phones and Blackberry-like devices will have intrinsic capabilities which tie in with existing and evolving blog servers and software; voice recognition software will come of age and cell phones will be the new dictation machine with the output being an online web page somewhere. Real-simple-syndication (RSS) feeds will continue to take hold and most formalized and in-formalized web publications will offer RSS feeds - many at a detailed level. This is nearly true today with the various email postings one can subscribe to from the major online publishing sources. This is almost universally true for blogs as a subset of the web world. Aggregators, software which receives a series of RSS feeds and assimilates a string of discrete and different postings into a single, threaded, "article," already exist for most of the popular browsers and email clients.
The fraction of a percent of internet-capable individuals who now publish blogs will change. Soon that fraction of a percent will turn into a single digit representation of those with internet access. It's difficult to predict how many browsers will become publishers given that there are an infinite range of personalities involved here. Some are extroverts who want everyone to witness the world through their eyes; others are exhibitionists who want nothing better than an audience; some are proponents of a particular view who want converts and have no qualms about standing on that stage in front of strangers. Others, though, are reluctant to reveal their private thoughts. There are the introverts who read but won't talk to strangers in a public setting. Others may be intimidated by the concept of their thoughts being read by someone on the other side of the planet who may actually "talk" back. The one surety we can bank on, though, is that the concept of personal blogging will continue to evolve and the numbers of players will continue to grow.
The Sociological Component
Which brings up the sociological component of the equation. Where are we headed as a people if we continue to publish our lives for any and all to read or participate in? Does this portend a new kind of "public?" I'd venture the answer is yes. Among the elements responsible for the eventual fall of the Soviet empire and its Iron Curtain was the access to information from outside that Iron Curtain by those confined behind it. No, it wasn't Radio Free Europe or the Voice of America. It was the videotape cassette which was smuggled into country after country, winding up in the hands of citizen after citizen. These video tapes showed the Iron Curtain citizens that the view of the world they were being shown on State Television and in State Cinema was only "one" view of the world. There were a thousand other views from tapes sent to family and friends by individuals all over the globe. These included tapes of commercial programs, tapes of news programs, but even more than that, tapes of personal experiences by individuals living in countries not subject to the Soviet "right-think." Eventually there developed an underground of information, supplanted in the latter days of the Soviet Empire by internet postings (mostly old-style bulletin board systems). This underground proved to be resilient to the State efforts to discredit the information because it came from trusted sources - friends and family of the citizens inside the Iron Curtain.
It's not enough to suggest that "information wants to be free," one must look further and deeper into what that means to understand the underlying power of "real" information. Information is what we get from others - in person and through our senses. We grow up with a sense of information assessment by being taught that certain sources are "valid" or "trusted" or "know what they're talking about." This starts at the earliest ages with parents telling their children that "so and so" might be full of mush and don't believe anything they say. This continues through our education - no matter where we are educated. Eventually, we - us humans - wind up with an internal list of sources we rely on for valuable information and other sources we may dispute or outright disbelieve. Because the evolution of communications now involves a personal transmission of information via cell phone, via Blackberry, via any device really, and because the information can be received in real time (phone or pager) or browsed at leisure (web, voice mail, email), we now have access to information which can be retrieved at our convenience. But, we also have information which can be sourced from "trusted" voices. Email we receive from a long-standing friend or relative might contain data about something pertinent to our lives and because of the value of the communications source, we treat that data differently than we might treat the same data from a neutral or suspect source.
This places us in the interesting position of being able to read "the news" from a known source such as the New York Times or Washington Post or CNN and being able to query a news item to someone we might know personally who has direct access to the same event or information. Following the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001, I published three daily letters to a listing of friends and family via email. My postings took issue with some of the published reports appearing in the online pages of the WashPost and NYTimes and others. My reason for writing these articles and posting them was because I knew that I had a different perspective and a different "take" on the events from those which I was reading in the regular papers and that those same papers were distorting what I considered to be intrinsic facts with regard to the events in Washington, DC, and the impact on the local population. Because I sent this email to friends who had known me for a number of years and to family members, I knew that my view of events would have at least an equal credibility factor to that presented by the online papers and I wanted my friends and family to have another view. This was a deliberate use of the credibility factor associated with personal knowledge of someone to provide a different view of the world. These friends and family could gauge themselves as to whether or not my comments were valid based on their knowledge of me and my trustworthiness to them. They might "trust" the NYTimes or WashPost for something where they had no other choice, but given a choice between those publications and someone they personally knew, there is a likelihood that they would look to the person they know for a more informed view.
This is where blogs have an advantage over the existing media universe. Bloggers are known to at least some individuals. Yes, a newspaper reporter may be known to some individuals also, but those reading online publications and blogs now have a choice of valid reference points when they read about an event. The fact that there are millions of bloggers publishing daily means that on any given day an event of some import - as reported by an online media service - will also likely be known by someone who publishes a blog. There are now at least two choices for a source of news with respect to both "important" and "less important" events - the official reportage as published by the media outlets and the equally "official" reportage as published by an individual with local knowledge who runs a blog.
We've seen the effects of the use of blogs in the candidacy of Howard Dean. We've also seen the effects of blogs and email in the rise of organizations such as MoveOn and American Progress Fund (both very liberal). Even Michael Moore now runs a blog, but then so do Moby and Wil Wheaton.
In fact, if you're curious about someone, Google their name and see what happens. This is one of the sociological implications of blogging. There are now a huge number of individuals who have a wide and deep return when you Google their name. Not only that, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM are all involved in advanced search projects which would return linked data-sets based on query terms. Think about this. If I were to enter your house and give you a word - say "banana," how many items could you retrieve which were relevant to that word as a search query? You might have a bunch of bananas, you might have vanilla wafers which are used to make banana pudding, you certainly have an oven and probably a mixer and a set of mixing bowls, you probably have at least one cookbook. You might have a loaf of banana-nut bread or maybe a picture which includes a monkey eating a banana. You might have a bunch of clothes from the Banana Republic. How many items would be returned from such a simple query term? This is the project these companies have embarked on - all individually - to return "sets" of relevant data based on your search term. Now stretch your imagination and apply this technology to the world wide web. Imagine if you are looking for information about a park campground and you enter the park name and the word campground. With the possibility that others might have camped there and blogged about it and the probability that the park management organization (state or private) also has a regular web page, you might get higher ranked results from the personal experience blogs than from the professional website. That, of course, might be exactly what you're looking for - and then again, it might not.
Technology and sociology mingle in the arena of search engines. We've become accustomed to using the web for everything from TV Guide to the weather to making online airplane and hotel and park reservations. We've also become accustomed to using the web to find relevant instances of advice from others who may have preceded us on some adventure. This is possible to do today but will be much more likely to be the norm following the efforts of Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and IBM. And, given the ease of publishing a blog, there's a possibility that the advanced search technologies might themselves engender a new wave of publishing from those who have those relevant experiences and wish to share them with others. How much easier might it be to track down one's distant cousins or half-brothers or step-sisters with advanced search capabilities and more and more individuals publishing their lives online?
Positive versus Negative Aspects
These are the positive elements of the blog revolution. There are also the negative elements. How many times have you said something in the company of someone you later thought might be the "wrong" person to overhear some remark you made. How likely is that remark to be published for others to read about it in the future? More likely than you might think. We already live in a world where our activities in public spaces are as likely to be captured on some security video camera than not. When you extract money from an ATM machine, when you enter a drugstore or supermarket, even when you pay a toll at a highway booth, your actions are either recorded on video or snapshotted by some digital apparatus. Even your license plate is now the subject of still digital image taking in a great many cities and on a great number of highways. Our lives in public spaces are now even more public than we may wish. The web is filled with images taken from security cameras which reveal - in a distant location or vehicle - a couple engaged in hot and heavy private activities. Did that couple expect their private moments to be captured forever by some distant security camera? Probably not. As email and web use at work places has become more and more tracked by third-party individuals or organizations paid to determine appropriate use, we have moved to a more learned use of that technology in the work place. We no longer - or at least we should no longer - expect privacy for our use of email and web browsing in the work place. Our actions in the public sphere - in parks, in parked cars in public lots, behind boardwalk moorings at the beach, in a corner in a department store - are no longer of a nature that we could classify as "private." If we're doing something in a public space, chances are very likely that there is going to be a digital (or analog) record of our activities somewhere.
With more cell phones with built-in cameras, with more use of digital cameras, with the ease with which something can and is published online these days, our actions in public spaces are now subject to both "official" digital recording and to "unofficial, private" recording by individuals. Blogs are already replete with images of others taken in public spaces. There is no "permission to reproduce" form which these bloggers request an individual to fill out. No, there is simply this expectation that if one is in public, one's actions and activities can and probably will be recorded by someone and probably also published online for any and all to peruse. This makes the most profound negative element of blogging the universal loss of privacy of everyone in a public space, not to mention the publication of private moments as mentioned earlier. There are a number of laws on the books in a variety of states and countries already which prohibit the use of digital cameras or camera-equipped cell phones to take inappropriate images of individuals. By inappropriate, most of these laws stipulate prohibitions against their use in "bathrooms" or other locations of expected privacy. These laws are not universal, though, and they do not cover all instances of what might be considered "private" situations. It's a shame, but a lot of individuals choose or are forced into situations where their most private, aggrieved, moments are, in fact, in a very public space. How many times does one find an individual sobbing uncontrollably in a park on a bench, or in a car in a parking lot, or even in a shopping center on the one bench set aside from the others along the main walkway? These individuals are having very private moments and they may not have chosen that location for their moment of grief or extreme sadness, but there they are looking very forlorn and tender and vulnerable. By being in a public space they are subject to being the object of some bloggers comments or some blogging photographer's image gallery.
Is this fair? Is this legal? Is this in keeping with our social contract? It is probably not fair. It is, for the most part, perfectly legal in most instances and in most locations today. It may be a question of pertinence with respect to our social contract. When is there an expectation of privacy in a public arena? A couple making out in a movie theater may believe they are in a private location but in legal terms they are in a public space. In terms of the social contract, there are probably a larger number of individuals who would say it would be better for them to make out in their apartment than in a movie theater.
The evolving record of our planet, of our lives, by the bloggers and blogging photographers is a continuing story of the capture of many private moments. How should we deal with this drama. Should we be "less" public when we're in public spaces, and by this I mean, should we act in more restrained manners, masking our emotions, our glee, our joy and our griefs? Should we accept that our lives are part of a grander society and that when we engage in public activities with that society that our lives become part of the permanent record of that society - for better or worse?
Certainly for those who are extroverts, exhibitionists, or who have pretenses towards acting or public debate, these individuals will probably not be concerned that their activities are caught by others, nor are they probably concerned that their actions and activities may be seen by individuals not physically present. We already have a precedent for public disclosure of very private moments with the success and popularity of television programs such as "Funniest Home Videos." And, television has also given us the daytime talk and audience participation programs where "husbands who sleep with the mothers of their wives" and other outrageous personal acts are displayed and mocked. Jerry Springer may be the most outrageous or most known but his show is hardly a unique example. Or, what about "Cops" and the dozen look-alike programs such as "Most Dangerous Car Chases?" In a sense we have already provided the foundation for a relinquishing of our privacy through these programs and their success.
I'm not sure that those who worry about their privacy have even actually considered the subject matter seriously. If you make a phone call at an airport pay phone, your conversation is available for anyone nearby to hear and listen in on. Using a cell phone on a bus or in the subway or in a park is the same invitation. At thousands upon thousands of Fourth of July festivals across America, score thousand citizens of this country engage in familial activities in a most public manner. We scold our children in public, we argue with our spouses in public, we argue with neighbors on our streets, we discuss with often angry language the length of lines at check-out stands in supermarkets. We do all this in public with no expectation of privacy. What if we did all this, were captured by someone with a digital camera (or, Heaven forbid, a DV camera), and the results posted on someone's blog or website. Would we change our behavior or would we simply accept the fact that our lives are, in fact, public when we are in the public arena.
I contend that we would accept the inevitable publication of our private moments. Maybe not universally and maybe not with a great deal of comfort. But, because it wouldn't be that much different from our present environment, the reproduction of our lives on the web would not be that much of a change from today's rather public situation.
Is this Evolution?
If we're evolving in this direction - both because of past events which have led us down this path and with present and evolving technology and those who are using it - are we becoming a more public species? Are our lives such that they are a permanent element of the history of the planet? Yes. They are. A powerful example of this is the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Family members of individuals who were killed by the Nazi's can use the Museum's library and find any and all instances of record about their lost relative, using elaborate, digitally-converted, records and artifacts. Sitting down at a computer console, a survivor from a Nazi concentration camp, or the surviving family member, can search a relative or friend and find whatever might be the electronic remains of that individual's life. Letters, digitized, photographs, digitized, a compilation of the orders the Nazi's used to transport the person, whatever there is that is a record of that individual's life is available for the survivor to view. It's an attempt to personalize the lives of those who were lost and to provide a memento to those who survive. In a very real sense, these digital records are the family heirlooms for a huge number of survivors. Certainly, Ken Burns was able to capture the personalities and some element of the lives of those who fought in the Civil War by showing photographs and assembling a collection of letters home from some of the soldiers. Has their privacy been invaded? Probably. Is there some social goodness factor which allows this privacy factor to be overridden? Yes. The lives of those who came after are enriched by these disclosures from the private lives of these individuals.
This becomes a philosophical as well as sociological question at this point. Our lives are lived out in a public arena - we share our space with others in our community. Our communities share their existence temporally with other communities. Was the trial in Laramie, Wyoming, over the death of Matthew Shepard and the subsequent PBS re-enactment of that event a public disclosure of the private lives of a significant number of Laramie residents? Yes. Was it a worthy thing to do? Yes. Because it showed what happens to a town when a few individuals who are part of that community do something which the world at large views as heinous, and, it shows what members of that community went through and where their society evolved - or has not yet. Their actions were done in a public arena and capturing those activities was no breach of privacy. Those who went further and revealed their private thoughts and consternations and fears and hopes did so with the expectation that others might learn from their mistakes.
So it is with blogs. We have a few individuals now who might be breaching some fine line in the sand which differentiates what is truly private from what is accepted as public. These individuals are taking a chance of being castigated or ignored. But, they are also showing the rest of those reading and publishing on the internet that there is something to be gained from merging the private with the public. As we grow into a global species we will need knowledge and experience from those whose experiences are completely different from ours. We might get these through visiting troupes, or through the cinema, or from existing media presentations. Our faith and our trust in these established outlets may range from complete to not-at-all. We may also view those who present a foreign view with suspicion, even if they are native to that view. But, we stand a greater chance of growing as a species if we have more voices from more different viewpoints. The world of blogging allows the distribution of a vast universe of new and different voices and viewpoints and it allows us to participate in the lives of others we don't know. We can vicariously see the world through a thousand other eyes and experience our own world as seen by someone whose background, experience and perspective is - perhaps - completely at odds with ours. The advantage of blogs is that they provide this new world view and do so in the most benign manner. I don't have to continue to read the journal of someone who might threaten or frighten me. There's a volition involved. If I'm interested, I can continue to read and follow the life of that individual with no personal fear that I'll ever actually run across them in real life. I can comment and begin a dialog or I can "lurk" and simply read what is going on in their mind and in their world and read the comments of others.
Laws which are presently applicable with respect to blogs involve the issues of privacy, slander, hate crimes and threats. Interestingly enough, there don't seem to be any laws proposed or applicable which do not also affect existing relationships between individuals. Blogs, then, seem to be merely the next evolution in our relationship with each other. The norms of decency and approbation will still apply. The social contract still exists - though with blogs from all over the planet now available for review - the social contract itself must be examined. We have one here in America. There's one in France, India, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Iceland, and, in fact, anywhere where there is a sovereign group of citizens. We know from the world of online pornography that different countries take a different view of what is and is not acceptable in the privacy of one's own home. We can also assume that those who blog may be a leading edge of that society's main element. We can almost certainly assume that it is the younger component of that society's population. Here in the United States, the bulk (greater than 60 percent) of the online blogs are published by individuals between 12 and 32. That makes sense as it's usually the younger set which embraces a new communications technology or sociology. Jump one generation in the future, though, and we have a planet with the bulk of the population accepting of a public life, accepting the fact that their public actions could be the meat of someone else's journal. The interesting character is no longer the individual from a novel or other fictional work. Instead, the interesting character is today's odd bus patron whose actions were caught on camera and recorded in someone else's blog.
What Should the Society Do?
There are society implications for this new evolution as well. Like the Holocaust Museum, there ought to be places where one's life can be accessed in the totality of its digital record. Not simply as the result of some Google search - even using the advanced search engines which will be here soon enough. No, there needs to be some new element of library science which looks at how to properly catalog and make available the online record of individual's lives. There are hundreds of photography blogs where the daily product is someone's digital imagery. That imagery can be of a place, of an event, of their lives, of their friends or family. No matter, the sum of these photo blogs is the visual perspective of an individual. The same is true for the text blogs, which number thousands of times greater. Over a year or several year's worth of daily or aperiodic comments, there is the sum of an individual's world view. These blogs record the ups and downs, the griefs and joys, the daily interactions and foibles of their authors. This is a sociological record of the people of Earth. It shouldn't be a situation where this record of these lives is simply "here today, gone tomorrow." This is the first time in our history where a vast number of individuals can (and do) record their perspectives. Many of these records can be cross-referenced with respect to the same event. How many New Yorkers or Washingtonians (or Marylanders or Virginians or New Jerseyites or Connecticutians) recorded their lives on September 11, 2001, and subsequently recorded their daily evolving world view afterwards. This is a record of interest to a large number of individuals, both now and perhaps even more so in the near and far future. These blogs and journals and diaries and photo records should be accessible through some form of central system. There needs to be a time-referential and place-referential system to co-locate the stories which were contemporary to the second but which might have been blocks or miles apart. This is a fantastic record we're creating but it needs to be looked at from a retrieval perspective.
Changing Our World View
For the first time ever we have an opportunity to capture the life and times of our planet. We can locate and produce a pulse for this Earth. We have millions of individuals now engaged in a reportorial activity - whether they accept that role or not they are reporting on their lives as members of the human species and they are reporting on events in their locale and the implications of those events. We need, as a population of intelligent beings, to begin to consider what to do with these records and how to get them categorized and made accessible. We also need to begin to worry about a more permanent form of storage. One of the chores I engaged in while webmaster at NASA Headquarters was to provide an archive of the NASA web for the National Archives. This was something which was requested by the Clinton Administration and which we weren't exactly all that happy to oblige. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to capture a "state of the Agency" at a period which was specific in time and which, when viewed later, would give an insight as to the comings and goings of the 25,000 or so individuals who comprised that enterprise. A gargantuan task, to be sure, but when completed, after many months of capture and encoding, was a worthy image of an exploration agency engaged in some of this planet's most exciting ventures. The same may not be true of 25,000 random and unconnected individual's web logs, journals, or diaries, but, it may. We don't know what we would capture if we gathered that many individual blogs together and linked them appropriately to each other. Appropriate would be using topical links such as simultaneity in time or proximity in space or coincidence of event.
I'm proposing that we have a vast and valuable resource in these personal blogs and that we should, as a species, begin to explore how we might make better use of these resources. I would also propose that anyone who operates a blog take a look at their past product and consider making PDF snapshots by day or week or month, or begin to assemble sets of entries by topic. Most blogging software allows for some form of archival activity, some software products allow for the level of flexibility which I described. Stewart Brand began an assemblage of personalized facts with the publication in 1968 of the first "Whole Earth Catalog." Brand has gone on to many more interesting projects in the meantime (Google him). A blog inventory and categorization and accessibility project involving our best and most advanced concepts of both search technology and library science would be an appropriate activity for these times - nearly 40 years after that first Whole Earth Catalog and potentially two generations removed from those heady hippy days of yore.
I'll be evolving these thoughts through the next several years. I'll be attempting some of what I've proposed using my own blog as the resource. For instance, in my explorations of Seattle, the Northwest, and North America, I've made numerous entries crossing back and forth through some of the same topics time and again. One easy project for me would be to abstract those topical entries and compile them under headings associated with each topic. Since most of what I've documented has also been accompanied by digital imagery, I'd have to include that imagery in any compilation. I've written close to two million words in a single year and published close to a thousand images. That's a huge record of "something." By compiling the topical entries, I reduce the random data to accessible topical knowledge sets. To what end? Knowledge distribution. We need more of it. With the billions of words being published daily by millions of bloggers there's every likelihood that vast knowledge sets exist. Think about it.
Post Script
All references to empirical data or citations with "facts" were verified by multiple searches using Google or Yahoo, or typically, both. References which stipulate hard data were cross-referenced using web-based resources to ensure the validity of the data through more than a single source. Nearly any instance of a fact or data set referenced in this essay can be reproduced using appropriate query terms through either Yahoo or Google search engines.
The impetus for this essay was the realization that once again we, the human species, are at the threshold of a new era. This new era will be one where individuals are connected through remote but live telecommunications channels which include the personal journal, diary, or blog, and ,which, more often than not, have digital imagery enhancing the information. How we evolve in this new era is of interest to me from a sociological, technological, anthropological, and philosophical perspective. My entire life has been one of personal involvement with the content, technology, and implications of information dissemination. My personal heroes are René Descartes, Charles Darwin, Loren Eiseley and Rod Serling. I believe in active evolution - that is we can evolve ourselves and our species by conscious and willful effort. We are at a moment in the evolution of our species where willful and thoughtful activity towards our future is at a tremendous leverage advantage. As a species, this is the first generation where global communication with our kind is possible. It's important that we approach that capability collectively and equally important that we begin to think about our species as cohesive. The days of the tribe are numbered. What follows tribalism is ours to determine, collectively and individually.
For an interesting, OTHER, view on this same topic matter, see <http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/ols-master.html>. It's a Flash presentation looking back from a point in time a decade ahead - 2014. Worth your while, it's about seven minutes long, a lot shorter than getting to this point in this essay!
Posted: Wed - January 5, 2005 at 04:30 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM