Walking the Wall

I stumbled on The World as a Blog
the other night, and I have to admit that I have been hooked into
staring at it late at night and watching snippets of people’s thoughts
popping up all over the world. I don’t click on very many of them, but
there is a crazy sense of connection to be sitting up, thinking over a
new blog entry and watching people around the world do the very same
thing.  Mikel Maron, the developer of World as  a Blog,  draws attention between the disparity between the ideological era of “The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace“
that announced to the world, “Ours is a world that is both everywhere
and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live,” and the Silicon Valley
disconnected sprawl of the possible future if everyone was “jacked in”
all the time.  I remember when Barlow’s Declaration hit the net
and spread like wildfire.  In Marge Piercy’s book,He, She, and It
(a book I highly recommend), the future is a world in which people are
“jacked in” all the time, when most of their wars are fought in the
realms of “cyberspace” and where people, devoid of physical bodies
while “in,” question what it means to be human.  Blogging seems to
be a reaction to the disconnection of society, an attempt to feel
connected by thoughts, if not physical space. The World as a Blog
brings that reconnection full circle giving a sense of physical unity
to a purely mental connection–or, as Maron further notes,  it might
just prove that we are world of gossips and The World as a Blog is just
” like eavesdropping on the entire planet.”