7-30-05 Much Ado About Nothing

Inner Sanctum: (or My Twisted Perspective with Regard to Perspectives)
The question to be answered is: Why Blog? (please feel free to post your own perspectives)

I received an e-mail from my friend. It was very angry. The tone was offensive (or offended, I'm not sure which.) The e-mail requested "Why would anyone want a blog?!!" She then began to describe blogs as stupid, horrible, waste-of-time creations. I merely laughed and replied "I have a blog". Thus ended the conversation.
I do not know the back-story of why she felt blogging to be an insane act, nor did I bother to offer her my url. I know that she lives in a different reality than I. In her reality the internet is not much more than a very current encyclopedia and phone book. Cyberspace does not exist to her.

Blog creation is based on individual perspective. This means that there are a couple of billion reasons to create a blog. Consider this; If 500 people go to the same church service, each of them will hear the same words yet they will each leave with a different interpretation of those words. That interpretation is based on life experience. (i.e. perspective)
No two people have the same life experience. My brother and I can sit and talk about things we did together as children. We were at the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing and yet our stories will be vastly different. Our interpretation of the experience is unique to each of us. Our perspective of the world is different. (His is about 6 inches taller than mine for starts.)

I recall a writing professor in college stating that "All written word is biased". It would have to be. To find evidence of this, read a history book written in Germany and then one written in America. Suddenly history is not the same. We are biased by our life experiences. (Anika was taught that there was a society of humans on the moon. Who wrote that book??)

So, why blog? One man blogs his paintings for sale. A Painting A Day
Another blogs political interests, and another blogs sports interests. People blog to provide information on the home softball team or news or How to be a Muslim in an American society. (I find these very interesting.) Some people blog fantasies. (Fantasy blogs interest me. I often wonder if the pretty college girl writing the "Hustler Magazine" smut (with photos no less) is actually a 50yr old guy sitting at home in his underwear. ICK!) In many ways, cyberspace allows us freedom. Often, too much freedom. There are no obligations in this particular vast universe. There are no rules of social acceptance. Anything goes.

The greater percentage of blogs are just journals. Our lives written out from our perspectives. (there's that word again). My blog is a journal. It's sole purpose is to offer me privacy. This is where reality begins to spin off into sci-fi. Hold on to your seats. I'm about to eradicate all human existence.

For this rambling essay, the word Reality* will refer to the tangible world. Physical, material bodies and objects only. People exist in reality. You exist, your chair exists, your keyboard, monitor etc. All real and tangible. Reality: the place where you wake up, relate to human beings, consume living things, return to sleep. That is reality. It existed long before Cyberspace.

Cyberspace is not reality. There is no chair in Cyberspace. There is no keyboard. There is no human being. No one is running about or shaking hands. None of it is real. Cyberspace is a consistently moving electronic field. It is only slightly more than nothing at all.

My family and friends and husband are not aware of my blog. (as far as I know) This allows me to drivel the thoughts in my head. By that explanation, I have sent information from my head into cyberspace. These thoughts do not exist in Reality. I have not shared them or written them. They are electronic impulses...squared. Synapses of the brain into pixels. Zeros and ones.

Conceivably, the internet could vanish in an instant. (Pause a moment and consider how mortifying that would be.) If the internet went away, or even just the server where my blog is stored, all of these thoughts would be forever lost....as if they never existed at all. Ah, impermanence, one of my favorite concepts.
Anika describes bloggers as "Imaginary Internet Friends". This is the best description I can find so far for my purpose here. THIS is all imaginary.

I blog, therefore I am not.

*A few notes on Reality:
 Edgar Cayce studied and wrote a great deal on the topic of bending spoons and walking through walls. The spoon and the wall do not really exist.
 Uri Geller bent the spoon. Or did he bend his perspective of the spoon? Or did he bend YOUR perspective of the spoon?
 Einstein spent the better part of his life trying to explain that we (Reality - the chair, the spoon, the keyboard, you, the grass) are nothing more than electronic impulses. (The Matrix?)
 The entirety of Buddhist principles are based on the idea that we are, in a way, only one amazingly large mass-hallucination. (Ok, that's over-simplifying, I know.)
 Ruth Shelton felt that we could overcome the existence of the chair by no longer believing that the chair is there. She also felt that we all see a different chair.

I blog, therefore I am not? Maybe none of us are at all anyway.