Quick Thought About Blogs

Quick Thought: Blogs are like a digital identity. Well, it's more than that. It's more like a digital existence. Or maybe it's like a house. A blog holds my thoughts, my wants, desires, likes, dislikes, etc. If we think about blogs as individuals in the digital world, what would we predict for the future of blogging?

It seems that many people are surprised at the surge in the popularity of blogging. Even more remarkable is the fact that blogging has existed for years before the current swell of attention sprang up (in fact, I like to brag that I am an original blogger from way back, as I held my own text-only version of my blog on my own website for a while, before xanga/blogger came out with their pretty, cutesy versions).

Consider this:
Think about the blogosphere as a new land mass that has just been discovered, let's call it Blogos, kind of like how North America was discovered in the 1700s. In the early days, individuals would make the journey into cyberspace and set up shop with a blog, like early settlers and pilgrims that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. These settlers might even colonize, and bring a few friends along with them, or make friends with other bloggers they've found since arriving on Blogos. A small community forms (Think about any blog and how most have links on the right- or left-hand sidebar to friend's blogs).

Early on, Blogos was full of these small colonies, as groups of friends would keep track of each other's lives via their blogs, before empires like Blogger and Xanga came to Blogos, bringing wealth and gifts into the New World. They staked their piece of land on Blogos in search of starting a large Blogos city, with their pretty web landscaping/formatting and convenient publishing tool. They succeed in attracting newcomers to Blogos and assimilating a few O.G. bloggers along the way. In addition to forming communities with direct links to other bloggers, there arise public groups for affiliating any digital existence to a public label (NoR cAl AZNS!!!!!!!!!!!!!, or California Republicans). Now blogs have even evolved to cover more than just people and their lives, they've become commercial. There are sex blogs and political blogs and techno-blogs, sports blogs, company blogs, you name it. And I think they are all analogous to commercial offices/buildings in the city of Blogos. Recently, and not surprising considering Blogos is such a rapidly growing city/state, we have seen superstars and celebrities spring up in Blogos (think Drudge Report, Boing Boing, Fleshbot, Engadget, and more). What's next?

1) I predict our blogs will one day become intelligent enough to find other people who we should really get in touch with. My blog would go mingle in the digital world and find other blogs that comment on similar topics, or find blogs that would otherwise interest me, and I'll be presented with new people to meet every time I log on. The fact that the world will be blogging in the future and millions and maybe billions of people will be shouting out to the blogosphere will also necessitate this feature, because you can't read EVERYONE's blog.

2) Carrying the city analogy a bit further, I would have expected to see more group blogs, or blogs that describe a clique of friends, for example. It may well show up in the future, when a close-knit group of friends is tired of clicking through any number of different blogs just to catch up on their whole clique of friends. Maybe this will happen, only time will tell.

3) It would be interesting to see if any sort of political system arises from Blogos, in that users will get to democratically vote for changes they'd want Blogger.com to implement, for example. Would Bloggers be able to vote for the next CEO of Blogger.com?

4) Wouldn't it be interesting to have real estate in Blogos? I guess it would be like Geocities of old, but create a landscape with regions separated by both culture and topic or something, and allow blogs to take up shop on a specific lot. There could be a residential area for personal blogs, separate from commercial areas. There could be a mall, political headquarters, you name it. Old blogs that aren't updated can be "evicted" for not "paying rent" (updating), and they can be taken up by other bloggers who want to move to a higher-profile area. Bloggers would have neighbors, communities can form in a (virtual) physical space. You and your friends can live on the same block. Wow I like this idea. Perhaps I shall try to become the Donald Trump of the blogosphere. I can totally picture "taking a walk" around my neighborhood to read my friend's blogs. I can picture "driving to the mall" to go shopping for gadgets. I can picture a posh area of Blogos, where all the nicely-formatted blogs all live, and I can picture a minimalist area, for blogs who think that content is most important ("home is where the heart is").

Technology = Fatter, Dumber People?

I promise that I won't always write about education-related topics, but I just read another NYTimes.com article about how SAT Math scores have risen but SAT Verbal scores have remained flat, and have declined over the last 38 years from a high of 543 points in 1967 to 508 in 2005.

It reminded me of a thought I've held onto for a while now, and while it's no monstrous insight or revelation, it's an interesting conversation piece, if anything. I sometimes think that as technology has progressed, it has improved our math skills while impairing verbal skills.

Word-processing, for example, has made me a horrible essay-writer. Where children in the 50s and 60s and 70s had to start composing an essay from the beginning, I, with the powers bestowed on me by Microsoft Word, compose from the middle. It's just easier that way, for me at least.

Read books? Why not watch the movie?

Instant Messaging/Text-Messaging also wreaks it's own havoc. It's created it's own grammar and easily influenced youngsters (like my sister) begin to speak as if they are IMing someone. It's true, I've witnessed my sister speak to me in abbreviated, short sentences that would make no sense unless I translated what she said into IM talk. Of course, my sister must also be taking for granted that there is no running transcript of our dialog above my head.

E-mail has killed the handwritten letter.

There are plenty more examples, but I'd prefer to engage in an intellectual conversation than to simply preach from this soapbox of mine.

Why does education in America suck?

Ever since my childhood (I'll admit it wasn't that long ago), I've occassionally seen statistics about how the children of this country are falling behind other countries in terms of academic metrics like math literacy, reading literacy, and have always wondered how this figure could be real in a country as prosperous as the United States. As I was reading Bob Herbert, I had this thought: what is it about being a prosperous nation makes me think our education should be any better?

We're prosperous now, but that just means the adults that run this world today were well-educated when they were growing up. I have no statistics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and I doubt that objective ones are available for comparison between the USSR and the US), but I'd venture to say that the Cold-War bred a pervasive national pressure to be better educated. In this day and age, the pressure to succeed just isn't strong enough to motivate children to gain the skills we (as adults) see as necessary to be a successful contributor to society. Could it be that our country has gone complacent? And if so, will programs like No Child Left Behind effectively address this attitude of children?

Personally, I think that No Child Left Behind is at least a bit mis-guided. While it may have been true in the past that US kids were falling behind because standard education was not available to all, I think the tide may have turned (I try not to use the phrase "tipping point" because man, everyone and their mom uses that term). Nowadays the education deficit shows up more in the attitudes of the children that we are trying to teach. They understand that the government says they need to learn how to read, but they don't know why it's so important.

How can we express to children these days the importance of education without fabricating a comeptitor or "enemy"?

I think the core concept here is competition. Has the competition that makes capitalism so great been missing from education? I can't decide. The topic has been broached before when the Soviets fell and the US was the only remaining superpower, but I wonder if the education system is showing us the effects of the lone-superpower-syndrome.

If we need more competition, I suggest we further segment the school system, and I suggest it be done in middle and high schools. I have personally learned most in the transitions to a new school, into middle school, into high school, and into college.

Might it be beneficial to throw our kids into new systems with clean slates in which they can experiment and re-invent themselves? Kids these days are all about reinvention, why not give them a convenient vehicle to do it with? 10th graders should graduate from Frosh-Soph high school and move to a different, more mature high school for 11th and 12th graders.

How about making each school stage competitive? Of course this might suggest the "bad kids" go to one school and the "good kids" go to another, very likely causing the "bad kids" to feel alienated. So instead of measuring academic performance, I suggest each school should develop its own culture, and to have a different environment. Like a simplified college system, or like Gryffindor and Slytherin, for example. No school would be "better" than another, they would just be different.

OK, Time To Get Blogged-Down

So, after reading a NY Times article about Re-engineering the Internet, I've decided that I should dedicate my blog to things I question about the world, and post them in search of other people who would like to discuss such things with me. Regarding a re-engineering of the internet, I recall holding a specific conversation with Bryan Kennedy in May (or was it April) asking him, "How would you build the Internet if you had to do it all over again, starting now?" While I may not have been asking about security and pervasive networks like the article posted above, we definitely talked about how security is one of the primary issues facing the Internet today. We didn't come to any conclusions, but the point is that we were concerned about it, and posed the thought question. I'm also very sure those at the NSF (who the article is referring to have been thinking about this for a while now too). But give us some credit, we aren't (yet) top scientists whoa re on top of the academic world of the Internet.

I also find some inspiration from Ender's Game, a (remarkably) old sci-fi novel (published I think in 1985 or so) about these super-intelligent kids who are tested by the government to find geniuses who are to be trained to be military generals by the time they are teenagers. In the story, Ender is the super-genius of military strategy, and he has two siblings who decide to make blogs (YES, there were BLOGS in this story from 1985) that comment on society, and gain a rather large following. Specifically, I recall a conversation between Valentine and Peter, where the question is posed, "Don't you ever say something at the dinner table, only to hear other, adult-people talking about it a few weeks later?" I'm paraphrasing, but today's Re-Engineering the Internet story felt just like that. More musings coming up, I hope.

Plangry

I made up a new word today, and it is "plangry." It is a word that combines "play" and "angry" to describe when Blaurb is only playfully angry with me. I find it quite useful.

Amidst the many promises of keeping up with my blog, I have not followed through. I have ignored it, I think because I get my daily dose of rambling on about myself through talking on the phone with Blaurb. Maybe I'll update, but I still don't yet have a theme or tpic for this blog. Is it going to be my boring daily life? Is it going to be my insignificant musings about the world? I'd love to be a cool blog, like PostSecret or something, but I wouldn't want it to be kitschy...maybe I'll think of something, maybe this blog will go the way of the horse and carriage...