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To pick up on Hank Roth's good commetnary about blogging and its overload
effects upon the networks and the readers, there is also a revenge effect for
the bloggers.
This might vary among generations but I hope there's enough common experience
to make this understandable:
Imagine that all kinds of things you said, pondered, described, and thought
had been preserved and cataloged in a way that snippets could pop up years
later?
If you are like me, there is a nice quality about the flow of life where much
of the past is left behind. While various theological views teach about every
word and deed being used in some final judgement, the practical lifetime
experience is that things are nowhere so in "dos velt", this world. Or least
that has been the case for much of human existence.
Much has been said and written about the surveillance and data mining
situation where governmental and corporate organizations collect enormous
amount of info about our lives. But blogging, like so many online activities,
has us providing all too much info.
Recently, I was following through a situation where New York City police and
other agencies were going after a fellow who used his Web site to post names,
home addresses, hangouts, children's names, etc. of any cops for whom he
could get info. A big mess. While the cops and the NY Post tabloid were
focusing upon the danger this posed to the cops, I found in my study that the
Web site author has done lot of damage to himself via online postings over
the past decade. I was able to Goggle up volumes of info about this fellow's
views, his postings, his various businesses, his brief stint at teaching at a
college that specializes in criminal justice subjects, and --most damning for
him-- diatribes concern the police. A significant amount of the really
damning info came from the Usenet postings cataloged by Google.
Now, various people have blamed Google for invading privacy by cataloging and
caching so many old postings. While I can understand the sense of intrusion
claimed, it reflecting an expectation that the Internet operates just like
the pre-Internet world where so much of the garbage fades away in the past
and lives go on.
Blogging goes much further than the Usenet, Web postings, etc. in buildign up
long-term collections of views, thoughts, expressions, etc. The blogging
medium, for the most part, encourages a stream of consciousness writing. Done
in some literary contexts, stream of consciousness writing can work when
edited and refined to communicate better. But the way most blogs work, it
gets cumbersome at best and makes it harder to sift through ideas. (The
impact of blogs upon search engines is a major concern where finding quality
info about any topic might mean wading through volumes of blog spew.)
Some say that the ongoing volumes of storage of the stream of consciousness
writings will be useful to teach up someday. (There are proposal for
blackboxing people's lives for business and other purposes.)
One of the other gotchas of blogging is in misdirected sense of intimacy. It
is easy to picture, as one blogs, the readers being theire and listening to
one's thoughts. But the readers might not be the ones imagined. (I wonder if
blogging might also encourage saying things one would not in an intimate
relationship because human in-person intimacy does entail some thought and
editing or one can face some interestign consequences. <g>)
In George Orwell's 1984, there is scene where the protagonists earlier
comments about his fear of rats secretly recorded is used to direct the
torure used against him. That is tame to what can be done with the blogged
comments. Manipulation on a grand scale. (By the way, ever notice that
blogging, at least in the spew form, is not done by the "powers that be".
<g>)
Colsing off, I am not against people writing and expressing their thoughts,
putting diaries online, etc. in themselves. I am, however, concerned with the
lack of though in both the choices of what's often put online and the mode of
expression. It does clutter the InterNUT. It also can provide too much
ill-fitting information that can complicate lives later on. (How many people
blogging are thinking how their words will sound decades later, how it will
sound to their children, to those who have no idea of the context of the
blogs, etc.?)
J.D. Abolins
(By the way, many of my writings and comments are searchable and cataloged
online. I am aware of that and keep it in mind as I post things. Not that I
always write high quality material but I try to consider the overall picture
that would come out of a search.)
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