Why I Do This

There are two reasons that I am keeping this weblog. The first is deeply personal. I enjoy the opportunity to put out my thoughts, heck, even to force them into a coherent form, and to possibly have them examined under a similarly interested scrutiny. I can create new ideas, for me at least, and have them tested by the rest of the world. If they are found wanting, the reasons that they are wanting come back to me and I can consider them and change the ideas if necessary.

When I first started writing this, I had an imaginary audience in my mind, and I wrote to them. After a few weeks, however, I stopped feeling that presence. That was probably when I put on the Site Meter and saw that I could go days without a single hit. That actually gave me the courage to start wrtiting down a more perssonal narrative. Obviously I was only writing for myself, so why not?

The second reason is really the first in a way. I came upon blogs and the connectivity with the rest of the world that they seemed to have. This article makes a lot of the points that lead me to take up this hobby. The idea of reading many different impressions on an event, each one from a different reference point, is very striking for me. I go on and on about how the world is fractal and that to properly understand it, one can not rely on one master view but instead need to have many smaller views from many smaller places. The environment of bloggers, known as the blogosphere, is tightly connected, with ideas able to bounce from one end of the world to the other and back again in seconds. I myself have posted comments on boards all over the world. The first comment to this blog came from England, how cool is that?

I believe that the blogosphere is similar, perhaps analogous, to a mind. Information comes in, is noticed by other elements around it, and is reacted to. If the reaction is positive, then the idea spreads, where it interacts with even more ideas. If the response is negative, it clashes with other ideas, and it dies off. The iterative nature of the exchange is fundamentally chaotic, ideas grow and change like storms over the ocean.

And like the apochryphal butterfly, this blog might just play a role in one of those storms someday.