A metaphor or scene I often envisage when I think about blogging and the new forms social interaction it permits, is a scene from the Steve Martin classic, The Man With Two Brains.
In particular, the scene in the movie where Steve Martin's character, the fantastically named Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, finds himself inside a laboratory where the brains of several deceased people sit suspended in fluid filled jars, connected to life support systems to keep the brains alive. In the movie Martin discovers that he can actually converse with the brains, the 'people' inside them don't realise that they're actually dead, if my memory serves me, instead they think that it just happens to be very dark in the room they think they are sitting in. Martin meets and falls in love with one of the brains, a female brain voiced by Sissy Spacek, and then decides to rescue her from the lab. See the movie, it's a classic.
But this particular scene perfectly describes for me the non-physical, disconnected nature of blogging as a social phenomenon, just brains sitting around talking to other brains. Blogging enables us to patch directly into each other's brains in an unconventional way that, whilst having much in common with that plain old form of social interaction otherwise known as reading & writing, blogging increases the frequency of communication and adds a much more flexible dynamism to enable a form of interaction more akin to regular conversation between people in the same room, but conversation unencumbered by physical appeal or revulsion, body language, accent, race or sex..
The question is, as bloggers, is the thing which drives us to blogging actually an intellectual desire or need to be with and to connect with people of similar lonely brain dispositions? Instead of the short-form lonely hearts adverts, where BMW driving SWM's search out FLF's with a GSOH and affected short term interests in the arts, good food and the interminable works of John Grisham, blogging is a long-form and grey-matter cousin where like-minded people with lonely brains, seek each other out and relate on new, Web enabled socio-intellectual terms.
There is the chance that we all suffer from the same kind of longing, a need to connect with our intellectual peers in ways our offline relationships either don't currently satisfy or cannot provide because of geography or other physical impediment. I have 'conversations' with people through blogging that my wife, my soul-mate, knows absolutely nothing about. That's not to say that we don't connect intellectually, it's just that other real-life stuff gets in the way and anyway, she'd eventually bore of listening to me droning on and on about using websites as impromptu torches. After all as bloggers it's not like we're making love, just having sex, speaking blogaphorically of course.
But am I being unfaithful in a different sense of the word? Am I playing away from home by taking part in blogging? I've only met a three other bloggers in real life, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt and Euan Semple, and I suppose in this equation that would be like consummating the bloggage? In fact, I vaguely recall it being almost as much fun.
In particular, the scene in the movie where Steve Martin's character, the fantastically named Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, finds himself inside a laboratory where the brains of several deceased people sit suspended in fluid filled jars, connected to life support systems to keep the brains alive. In the movie Martin discovers that he can actually converse with the brains, the 'people' inside them don't realise that they're actually dead, if my memory serves me, instead they think that it just happens to be very dark in the room they think they are sitting in. Martin meets and falls in love with one of the brains, a female brain voiced by Sissy Spacek, and then decides to rescue her from the lab. See the movie, it's a classic.
But this particular scene perfectly describes for me the non-physical, disconnected nature of blogging as a social phenomenon, just brains sitting around talking to other brains. Blogging enables us to patch directly into each other's brains in an unconventional way that, whilst having much in common with that plain old form of social interaction otherwise known as reading & writing, blogging increases the frequency of communication and adds a much more flexible dynamism to enable a form of interaction more akin to regular conversation between people in the same room, but conversation unencumbered by physical appeal or revulsion, body language, accent, race or sex..
The question is, as bloggers, is the thing which drives us to blogging actually an intellectual desire or need to be with and to connect with people of similar lonely brain dispositions? Instead of the short-form lonely hearts adverts, where BMW driving SWM's search out FLF's with a GSOH and affected short term interests in the arts, good food and the interminable works of John Grisham, blogging is a long-form and grey-matter cousin where like-minded people with lonely brains, seek each other out and relate on new, Web enabled socio-intellectual terms.
There is the chance that we all suffer from the same kind of longing, a need to connect with our intellectual peers in ways our offline relationships either don't currently satisfy or cannot provide because of geography or other physical impediment. I have 'conversations' with people through blogging that my wife, my soul-mate, knows absolutely nothing about. That's not to say that we don't connect intellectually, it's just that other real-life stuff gets in the way and anyway, she'd eventually bore of listening to me droning on and on about using websites as impromptu torches. After all as bloggers it's not like we're making love, just having sex, speaking blogaphorically of course.
But am I being unfaithful in a different sense of the word? Am I playing away from home by taking part in blogging? I've only met a three other bloggers in real life, Chris Locke, Halley Suitt and Euan Semple, and I suppose in this equation that would be like consummating the bloggage? In fact, I vaguely recall it being almost as much fun.