– Weblogs, 25 years into the future: “Ironically the cult’s website doesn’t validate.”
– Eroding personal time (my own $0.02: I think what is, or could be, happening here is that the boundary between work and notWork (as my personal email sig says) is becoming more & more porous, as the Web makes it possible to (a) take care of personal stuff from work – not that I ever would, of course and (b) handle work stuff from home. either direction is a little threatening.)
– Briefing for a descent into heck (but I like being called an ink-stained wretch!)
so maybe this would be a good place to expand a little on being thankful for the Internet.
first of all, my job, which I love, wouldn’t even exist without the Internet. what would I be doing otherwise? I’m not entirely sure…in 1998, when I first started to discover the Web, and first started writing for it, I was working as an administrative assistant. I’d been thinking about going into grantwriting, and I might’ve thought about print design as well, given how things turned out. but with the Web, I was able to learn on my own, and (this is important) from the Web itself – and besides, I may have been way behind the early adopters, but way behind could be defined in months or years instead of decades.
and that’s been important all along – I’ve bought books, but learned nearly as much from all the various Internet sources, not just Web sites, but also e-mail lists. I’d be lost, frankly, without the Digital Eve (was Webgrrls) list, the css-discuss list, the uwebdev list, the webaim list…. those last three, I discovered just this year!
the Internet is also my backup brain [© the Negrinos, apparently :)] – not just the actively chronicled bits here, but also the vast mass of knowledge embedded in the weblogs I read, including/especially the group weblogs Boing Boing and MetaFilter, and of course Google. and I can participate in the creation of that brain (giving a little CSS help, just today!), too.
but it’s more than just informative knowledge…it’s people that I only “know” (a whole other topic, that question of knowing people through their web writing) because of what they write in this medium, and knowing them has enriched my life in a personal way, made me think about things, given me a way to articulate what I’ve thought and felt.
and the (so far, disappointly few) people I once knew in person, and have reconnected with through weblogs (or whatever).
aside: people I’d like to see ‘blogging: Kat, Tom W., Matt R., Thao, Greyson. not that my saying it will make it so.
oh, and the funnies. and paying my bills. and ordering computer bits. and checking my bank account. and working from home.
so when I think about the Internet, I feel excited, happy, and, well, thankful.