Blogging Restructures Consciousness?

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Blogging Restructures Consciousness?
Following the links here will lead you on an interesting excursion, one that visits the MyDD direct democracy website, analysis of Snakes on a Plane, and which also visits the fascinating excerpts from Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. The point of departure is a political blogger's realization that, "After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned... I do not exist in the same way I once existed." His identity, he writes, has become subsumed by his blog. I have been overtly blogging since 1998, and writing online even longer. I don't know what it's like to think in writing, to think symbolically; my cognition is very much based around sound, the spoken word, and my pattern recognition is sub-linguistic, not even pictorial, but an intuitive grasp of non-representational relationships. More...