Five Years
March 3rd marked the fifth anniversary of this blog. Nick Smith helped me get started, and Nick also had the idea of a "Covenant College blogroll" which eventually evolved into the "live blog portal" of Chattablogs and the rest of the "Terrablogs" domains (with the help of Ben Huffine, Garret, Dwayne, John, Paul, and a number of other individuals over the years).
Even though our energies never really congealed to some kind of growth-oriented focus, I still believe the central premise of the project sound: people in the digital realm united by location, not ideology or interest. Even now I think the "local network" is an important part of Facebook's advantage over other social-networking platforms like MySpace.
The narcissism of blogging has a built-in temperance mechanism that goes into effect over time: once you've put something online, a record of what you've said always exists somewhere (most often in Google's cache). Unless you're a sociopath, it only takes a handful of burned bridges (or empty death threats) to instill a healthy respect for the power of words uttered in a universally accessible medium.
This generation will be the first who, upon death, will have an overwhelming amount of content - words, images, & video - available for anyone to effortlessly consume. Future generations will be able to quickly & effortlessly construct portraits of their ancestors. Big Macs, MacMansions, and now MacHistory. Will it be accurate? Does knowing a subject's opinion on Over The Rhine help them have a better sense of who he/she is?
Five years down. Thanks to everyone who's participated.
Blogging | By Josiah Roe | 3:56 AM
