On Conversation

I have a sense that blogging has clearly settled in for the long haul.  It’s a term that’s used more and more often in the greater public sphere now, and there are increasingly freuent workshops, conferences, blogwalks and other explorations of the possibilities it offers.  Which makes good sense.

Business and work gets done through conversations, and the purposeful communication of information – as does one’s social life with friends, family or community.  Conversations are the central process to building relationships, and we live in an age where the relationships are everything.

Blogging is about conversations, online. Blogging – the whole process, done in your own style – is a whole different way of watching the conversation unfold.

Rather than hearing words and using body language to infer and build meaning, blogging lets you – or makes you, I guess – read and then analyze what you’ve just read. 

You interact visually with it via text and image.  It’s a conversation, but the frame and the way it’s built are different than in 3D life.

You think about it … and then you comment, or sit and think, or move on,  stimulated and guided by what you just read.  It’s the way that your neurons and synaptic responses are sparking, and how that happens is different reading through a screen than sitting next to someone in a room, or talking to them on the phone.

The rhythym and cadence of attention that interactive blogging creates and shapes makes the way we process and understand the information different, too.  We begin to learn differently, and create differently.  Over time, we see the world in a fundamentally different way than before we started interconnecting.

And, along the way, if we are open enough, we demonstrate our quirks, our idiosyncracies, our flaws and our own peculiar brilliance.  Which is what makes us human.

Blogging in a surrounded-senses world helps us find our own way of organizing and demonstrating to others who we are and what we do, the way we see and relate to the world. 

And those others pull us into them, and together we grope for clearer meaning in a hyper-turbulent world.