June 18, 2004

Post-Social Relationships

OOOPS! Had the wrong link in this piece--you must have been as confused as I. It's corrected now.

Well written and interesting piece on post-social relationships and weblogging, which explores the human attributes some of us (I'm guilty) associate with our own, and one another's, weblogs. I agree that this was our initial impulse in the early days of blogging, when we rallied around the description of what we were doing here as "writing ourselves into existence," (heavy on the word "ourselves").

The online representations of the human form, blogs are our are avatars of voice, and more. As in, it's more than the physical (or virtual) weblog aperatus that takes on social importance and human attributes--it's the relationships swen among them, it's a variety of characteristics that vary from and among weblogs: the number of years a weblog/blogger has been writing, the depth of self revealed, the size and nature of the community, the intensity of various interblog relationships, and more.

I can't argue with the idea that weblogs are manifestations of the human form--they are the "us" that we can touch, hold, hug, love, slap, and strangle from a distance.

And they are also nothing at all.

There's the rub.