LEFT:
bink's "power speed bunny" jacket,
bought for 3 euros on the street in Palermo, Sicily
I. Why We Might Be a Bit Dazed; Or, The Internet Is a 16-Year-Old
"Here's one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo:--from "Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever", by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 October 2009. [Thanks for that link, Stefanie!]
on New Year's Day 1994... there were an estimated 623 websites.
In total. On the whole internet."
623 Web sites...
I think we must add 7 zeros to that number now, sixteen years later.
II. And it's taking us for a drive on an expressway with no maps in a car with no brakes.
Thank you, everyone, for commenting on comments.
It was a great reminder that, as Femminismo says, "My blog is for me," and it's up to us how we want to be online. Everyone does it differently, and there's no right or wrong way.
Indeed, that's one of the challenges: We're making this up as we go along.
The Western world was just getting to its feet after the invention of the printing press when the Industrial Revolution knocked us sideways. Staggering to our feet, the atomic bomb blew the new norm away... and now this, this technology-on-the-hoof stuff.
It's just a lot.
It calls for a certain kind of bravery to take it on, the whole swirling mess of it. I mean, we really are going where no one has gone before.
If humanity survives, in a few hundred years someone will be writing about this time the way historians write about the post-Gutenberg era: how did those poor monks and scribes deal with their world turning upside-down and inside-out?
III. Blogrolls & Followers
So, if you're up for another question about What Are We Doing Here?:
How do you all feel about blogrolls and followers?
Like 'em? Not?
I used to list blogs on my sidebar here, but I ran into some social awkwardness.
One blogger started to write stuff that was distasteful to me; but I felt weird taking her blog off because she was a friend.
Eventually I displeased her, and she yanked my blog off her blogroll in a second.
I felt I was back in the high school lunchroom, with its social tension over who sits at which table. (Facebook is far worse for me, which is why I quickly left.)
As for "followers," I appreciate that option as a way to follow you all (on my dashboard) because I've never used RSS feeds.
*blushes and admits not knowing how to use RSS*
But I don't add the Followers gadget to my sidebar because I don't even know who a couple of the followers are.
Fair enough. It's important to me that blogging is an open system, not restricted (another thing I didn't like about FB)--but that doesn't mean I want to look at these people's pictures.
I'm just calmer if I don't list followers/blogs on my sidebar.
I do like it, however, when other people have blogrolls. Especially I like when the blogroll shows thumbnail photos of recent posts.
But mostly I find other bloggers through the comments they leave on other blogs. Comments give you a kind of fresh sense of who a person is.
Any thoughts?
