Its great to be able to shift around in the skins of other people for a bit. Great to be able to probe both the darker and lighter regions of their thought processes. How else do we learn about what we ourselves think if we don\’t let ourselves be prodded by the input and influence of others.
People who claim to write in a vacuum are writing from somewhere similar — a dream world. Even if you don\’t actively seek out stimulus you receive it by osmosis. We live in a media-rich world where everything has been infected by the word virus, and even if you think that you are just looking at an image and not seeing a word you have not escaped a language. Who can see golden arches or a nike swoosh and not think of the products, the lifestyles which they are representing? Most of us are so intuitively savvy when it comes to the various semiotic signals we receive in the course of a day that this unavoidable.
The blogger system is genius — it allows you to dance across the world on the stepping stones of people\’s minds. Great thinkers, diarists, idiots, geniuses, artists, writers, all — and the great thing is that none of them are more important than the other. This format levels the playing field because whatever is written is going to be interesting to someone.
I recently set up a webring and my purpose in surfing was to try and find blogs of note that I would like to invite to join the ring. There are so many, and the fact that the choice is there is amazing. How many of these people would have been traped in their bedrooms with their thoughts, unable to share them with anyone but the mirror\’s reflection before this technology came about?
Blogsurfing should be the new mental sport of anyone with a computer and an interest in culture, thought, and people watching. This is the global cafe and it can be great fun seeing what people look like. This lets you have that x-ray vision we all wanted as kids; x-ray vision that lets you see some of people\’s souls.
