Sunday, August 22, 2004

Conversations in the woods

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? This is normally discussed as either being a pure physical act of generating a sound, straight physics regardless of perception or as the perception of sound as being integral to the act of being sound.

If you have the ability to say something to the world and you do, have you said anything? The current meme is that the blogosphere is where news really is. Power to the people. As if everyone that wanted one had their own printing press. Like exercise treadmills that many have, gathering dust in the corner. Or, set them slow, eating a snack, drinking a soft drink while they stroll.

And yet, we save random snapshots from our lives, which provide insights to common life from a period. A simple snapshot of my father standing in front of a house he lived in during the 1930's in Minnesota is fascinating to me. And might be again to a researcher on families of German immigrants to the U.S. back then. Yet, it doesn't contain the same drama of pictures of from Spain during the same time frame or shots taken of a large field in Nurnburg on selected nights.

And so, if you say something mundane, you open a window on your life, your family, your culture and yourself. Some rant, some rave and other rail against the machine. They're flamed, fanned, praised, quoted and ignored. Some have shown that leaders have feet of clay while some are the epitome of what this medium is about.

What will I do? I'm not Gutenberg, nor Hemmingway either. I'll update this periodically and add my breeze to the wind issuing from the blogosphere. And I may not make a sound in the forest.

But that's okay.

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