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Edited on Wed May-12-04 07:55 PM by scottxyz
It started the night of the last Presidential election. I don't have a TV, so I logged on somewhere to see who won.
Got conflicting reports on various news sources that night. (Back then, I didn't know what "blogs" were - didn't use news.google.com, probably just typed in cnn.com or abcnews.com or something.)
Started tracking down all the various links trying to find out the "truth" about who won the election...
...and have been stuck in this blog world ever since then, trying to find out the truth about so many other things our "media" had been hiding from us for the past few decades.
I've been AMAZED at the quality of writing and thinking on many blogs. It's something that's hard for a lot of people to resist.
Yes, it's very addicting. Unfortunately, I have no solution to the addictive aspects. "We live in interesting times."
Every day, I say "I'll just look at atrios, corrente, billmon and talkingpointsmemo today" and then it's off to the races until the wee hours.
I have read that despite the feeling of "community" we get from the web, the web can also can lead to depression. I think this is a real problem which hopefully can be addressed somehow. It can also take up so much time and attention that you lose touch with the world immediately around you. On the other hand, I think I've learned a LOT over the past couple of years - about how the world works, and how people communicate. But there's no question that blogs and the web have brought about a MAJOR change in my mental world. Like the music-downloading world, it's shown me that there's a LOT more talent out there than my local Tower Records or Barnes & Noble had led me to believe - and now I've got to deal with this vastly greater quantity of quality stuff.
Recent accelerating events
I've also noticed posts from people here recently (such as maggrwaggr) as well as some commenters such as SusanG on atrios, saying they're feeling overwhelmed not just by what we might call "blog addiction" but also by the rising tide of bad news these days - whether it's politics or culture or environment.
I've seen people recommending limiting the amount of hours, stopping to smell the roses - whatever that means for each one of us. (Cooking, spending time with loved ones, doing other work, etc.)
Maybe striking some sort of balance is the best thing. We can't obsess about events all day - but we can't put our heads in the sand either. (The neocons have shown us where THAT leads to.)
What's going on in our daily lives is REAL - and what's going on in the blogs is also REAL. I wish we were in a time where LESS what happening in the world.
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