Enter the Hive Mind
- or "I like how older people have grammar online"
When I moved to Australia I didn't start a 'blog straight off: that was M.'s job as the writer in the family, and an extension of her work in the days after she moved to the U.S. in emails to her friends (the "postcards from New York"). This represented a misapprehension on my part, because M. was in some measure subverted as a writer by maintaining a weblog, while her e-correspondence had not, and whereas for me a weblog was ultimately a more natural progression from my participation in computer technology from my work life into my personal life, an extension (or intrusion) as natural as that of watching broadcast to subscribing to cable television, or from adding a pager to one's telephonic capabilities to carrying a mobile and "texting" friends. I began - and continue, despite what I've learned in this time - to use this technology as it should be used: to my own ends, that is, to maintain communication with friends and family outside my more immediate geographical (and economic) reach; but I also use these posts from the same kind of vanity described in the NY Times article: to self-publish, in effect, the kind of philosophizing or poetics otherwise unavailable to me. In some ways, starting a 'blog of my own, recognizing (or having revealed to me) the diametric opposition of 'blogging to creating writing, provided insight to aspects of internet-facilitated communications as distinct forms of dialogue, separate from the traditional forms they resemble: email is to letters, as instant messaging is to phone calls, as weblogs are to journals. Not so, at least not when examined closely for the social effects. The e-forms are as revolutionary to communication and interpersonal relations as that of moving from horse-drawn carriages to mechanical locomotion. Internet-based communication is fulfilling the evolutionary changes presaged by telegraphy, the telephone, radio, television, becoming so pervasive and so permeable that thought and action nearly merge. This is only frightening when you spend time reading a Livejournal written and participated in by someone twenty years (or more) your junior, at which point you may well be inspired to curl up and devolve into your constituent protoplasmic particles. Don't despair: it isn't exactly the Matrix, after all, just a bunch of youngers getting ready to change the world the way it must. They do really need to use some of the basic rules of grammar, though, if they want to be understood.