blogging communication
Communication is such an intricate and powerful thing. I wonder how something that's so necessary for psychological development is affected by having such a public forum as an online journal. Scientific American wrote an article a few months back contradicting Nietzsche's assertion that insanity lies in the masses. It basically said that studies have shown that due to the consortia of varied intelligence and experience in a large or small group of people, problems tend to be worked out better when all of the different viewpoints mix to some sort of sociological mean (sorta like polling the audience from Who Wants to be a Millionaire). But I wonder if that's true of LJ. Instead of a closed group of people this is like open-source sociology. Aside from the entertainment bloggers who obviously write to an audience, even those that write for themselves, like I do, are influenced by the thought of both strangers and friends alike reading their own personal thoughts. Since communication is a vital part of self-identification, those that choose to chart their thoughts online ultimately go in a different direction than those that talk to a handful of friends and write in composition notebooks. It opens the door to an entire world of understanding of human development, but one can't help but wonder if our online journals are a representation of the world we see around us or if the world around us is starting to become a representation of our ability to so easily communicate to the masses. You have to admit that LJ is a world within a world. It's a microcosm. Why is it that blogging is so contagious? LJ's active member list is growing. When you look on your friends' list it's littered with updates from familiar faces, meaning quite a lot of people post with regularity. And reading someone's journal gives out such a false sense of intimacy and understanding. Weise (the kid involved in the latest school shooting) kept an LJ. I wonder how many suspected he would be on the news for killing a group of high schoolers. Communities develop to cover topics from fashion to bioinformatics. Bloggers called for the ousting of anchorman Dan Rather after it was pointed out that one of his reports was false. Soldiers and citizens alike can update from Iraq or other countries (though I'm not sure how monitored such posts might be). Words are powerful things. Words lead to thoughts lead to empires and revolutions. But most people don't give it that much thought.