Having been a highly opinionated person for a long time, I have managed to shoot my mouth off on many subjects with varying degrees of understanding and several differing, if not actually contradictory, perspectives. A side-effect of this is that I am occasionally quoted back to myself by someone who has remembered something outrageous that I said years ago, something which I have long forgotten. I have a similar feeling at reading something that I might have written months or years ago, except then it is more of a shock that I have forgotten than that I ever wrote it, (looks like the senior moments have arrived).
But the fact is that conversation is an ephemeral thing and very few of us recall exactly what we said, let alone what others say. What matters is the bonds that are created by the conversation itself, rather than the details. But, while we keep saying that blogs are "a conversation", we don't yet know how to deal with that emotionally or intellectually, which is why this post from Mamamusings (via James Farmer) is interesting.
We are very used to verbal conversations drifting off into the past, vaguely remembered things created and abandoned in a heartbeat, but ready to be taken up again at any time. Think of all the people you know with whom you can resume "the conversation" in a moment, even when you haven't seen or spoken to them for months, sometimes years.
Blogs, however, are a different kind of conversation. They are public for a start, so we take a little more care about what we say in them, they are rhetorical, we aren't always sure about who is the respondent, and it can be many. And they are archived, we can have our words recalled to us very accurately, so we have to be prepared to own them for a long time.
But we also have a cultural bias to thinking of the written word as something more important, more lasting, more valuable than the casual discussion with a friend or colleague. So we come to think of our written stuff as something that has a life of its own, that should be treated differently. Maybe it should, maybe we will just learn to let our recorded past conversations go as easily as our spoken ones. We certainly need to revisit the point in the learning spiral that passed through diaries and personal journals, many of which were written to be published long after the author had lost interest in their events, usually through dying. In Blogistan we want immortality now!
In the meantime, however, I too think of blogs as something more than just a chat; they are as much thinking out loud as talking in silence and they could easily become a useful tool for following the development of what I think about something, or the progress of that something itself. (Which i why Google is so interested in them) I've already asked Typepad for some modifications to the management tools that will allow me to retrospectively create and assign categories to keyword searches of my posts so that, for example, I could decide to do a seminar on something like micropublishing or participatory journalism and simply search the posts, create a new category, assign the posts to it, then download the lot to use as a basis for the seminar, or make it required pre-reading for participants who will be expected to add their comments both before and after.
Blogs have the potential to become all kinds of information tools, journals, scratch pads, anthologies, histories; we'll figure it out as we go along, mamamusings has made a great start, check out her comments page.
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