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'Nuff said!

Ollie went over to Seri's house for a playdate, and as Seri chattered excitedly about some new wall hooks that happened to be lying around in the entranceway, her father observed wryly, "Being 4 years old is like visiting a foreign country: everything seems different and interesting, and you feel compelled to remark on every ordinary detail of life." 

Truly said!

Andrew Sullivan writes in the November Atlantic Monthly about how blogging has changed journalism:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog

Blogging as a well-known journalist is a different experience, of course, from that of most citizen bloggers, but he has some interesting points about the way blogs have changed the way we create and consume knowledge. Excerpts below:

"It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers...its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in."

[Concerning logs -- e.g., ship logs -- in general] "As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did."

"This is writing with emotion not just under but always breaking through the surface. It renders a writer and a reader not just connected but linked in a visceral, personal way. The only term that really describes this is friendship."

"If I were to do an inventory of the material that appears on my blog, I’d estimate that a good third of it is reader-­generated, and a good third of my time is spent absorbing readers’ views, comments, and tips. Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions. .... Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper."

"[W]riting in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one..."

"There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music."

"[B]logging suffers from the same flaws as postmodernism: a failure to provide stable truth or a permanent perspective. A traditional writer is valued by readers precisely because they trust him to have thought long and hard about a subject, given it time to evolve in his head, and composed a piece of writing that is worth their time to read at length and to ponder. Bloggers don’t do this and cannot do this—and that limits them far more than it does traditional long-form writing."

"To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both... The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other."

I had a "wow, I never would have thought of that" moment at the Community Systems Foundation meeting yesterday when one of the attendees brought up his business in "green burials."  The idea is if you're trying to minimize your final impact on the earth, instead of cremation, you choose a cemetery with a mission of preserving open, natural space.  The argument is that -- in the U.S. these days at least -- no one is going to buy a cemetery and put a shopping mall on the land.  Of course, looking historically and globally, this hasn't exactly been true... Interesting idea, though.