| Jul. 8th, 2004 @ 04:14 pm do super bloggers wear undies over their pants? |
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:  geeky
How long have you been blogging? A couple of years? 6 months? If you've been doing this for a decent amount of time, you sort of start seeing behind the scenes details of the whole blogging community in general. For instance how aspects of cognition completely adapt to the new desensitized environment (I'm trying to say sensory-lessened, help me out here willya?) When you meet someone for the first time in the real world, your mind has experiential data to fall back upon. You're subconciously (sometimes very conciously) working out quick details about the person. Surface level details almost always prove correct. Sex, Age, nationality, communication abilities, sometimes sexual orientation etc etc we figure almost at once. In time, you add a lot more details to your mental database, to be used once more the next time someone new has to be analysed.
LJ being a virtual community, doesn't have much going for it sesnsorywise (?). (t'sokay... as long as you get my drift) The 2d interface and our ISPs combined make it virtually impossible to visualise a person besides through avatars, user names and journal content. Ironically, the loss of these aids is precisely what makes even the average blogger a super sensitive observer of people and what people do. Piecing together disparate data and cross referencing it with real world data is no mean feat. Yet people do this on the fly, in real time.
Bloggers are psychoanalysts. How else do you characterize a person within 6 posts. (The average number of posts read in an unfamiliar blog before you decide to bookmark it or move on.) And mostly, you have it right. This is the entire basis of 'friending' or 'adding' people to your friends list. In 6 posts the average blogger has figured out wether or not he belongs to a certain sub sect. And more often than not he's got it right. Drifters rarely retain blogs. Many people actually can't make the mark. They just can't blog. Sorta like the horse-whip indistry after someone went ahead and invented the automobile. (thats fucking inconsiderate, even for me... but it's true.)
Blogging frees you (notice i say blog VS write). Body and soul. The liberative experience of losing your body for the playground of thought cannot be experienced anywhere but here. People, places, and events are very very real, yet you could never explain that to a layman. Space and time is entirely meaningless. Nevertheless it hardly affects a conversation on LJ. People manage multi-threaded, multi-subject, cross cultural, time delayed conversations with no effort at all. Try that in the real world and you'll see how limiting it is.
And then there are the user pictures. The normal eye would think they are utterly meaningless. But with the bloggers advanced visual language, you see a lot of what most people would miss. The pics are always in context. Sort of like graphology. They don't just communicate identity, very often they are also mirrors of mental phases, secret preferences, and unspoken views. If you ever try voicing data that you process about these pics, you loose the essence. Your (left?)brain just fills in the normal details. If you let your subconcious process it on the other hand, the kind of data you mine is amazing.
whoa. long post, and i'm as usual straying from the point again.
but as a quick end to all of this, blogging has made you super aware of people. If you try and conciously put this to work for you, in the real world... who knows what you're capable of. Let me know if you actually spotted a skill you developed because of blogging. |
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juan_cadillac's journal
apathetic
