Erdos Had The Number First

I was wrong. This happens from time to time. From the time I turned to my wife and said “Honey, you’re
going to hear a lot more about these blog things” some years ago I have thought that blogs were both (simultaneously) a fad and without significant import vis a vis ¹
society and technology.

We live in a distributed world. We have friends that are far flung and family that are not next door. Human communication has always had some amount of difficulty with distance. Blogs bridge that distance.

Blogging as a way of keeping in touch with those aforementioned distant friends. “Oh, I forgot to tell you” is a thing of the past. And it lets you
tell people all the things you’ve been meaning to tell them but are at such a low priority you might not tell them.
Time is another issue. I don’t have time to tell everyone I know everything. You don’t have time to sit and listen to me blather. BUT, if I blog it and you read the blog you can select what information your interested in. You’re going to do that anyway, especially with me because I’m not always
worth listening to (this is not self-deprecation on my part, this is true of everyone: even you are not worth listening to sometimes gentle reader. Sorry.).

The blog may seem impersonal, but I don’t think it is. It just seems impersonal the way a telephone call used to. People used to write letters to one another and not taking the time to write a letter was considered thoughtless. But letters have come back, in a strange way. They’ve come back in the form of the panaply of electronic communication. email/blog/IM are all extensions of the same thing.

Not only are we creating our own Long Memory but we create the scaffolding of community. Note that I say it is the scaffolding of community. Forms and methods of communication do not build a community, they allow a community to be built. And that is the little nugget of thought I’ve been digging for here. Communities do
not happen by accident. They are built and maintained. One of the more important building materials is communication.

So I say “Blog On” and encourage your friends to blog and read their blogs and comment on their blogs and don’t hide behind your blog and don’t let others
hide behind theirs.

I’m on a mission to misuse vis a vis and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.