Birth of a Blogger

It's always a miraculous event when a virtual person emerges from the womb of message boards out into the 'real' world of blogging. Commenting on message boards is somewhat anonymous and you can become lost in a chorus of people and your words become part of a heap of other personalities. But when you blog, YOU are the sole dictator of what gets said and you set the tone an tempo with what you have to say. You can touch lives without even realizing it, in places you never even heard of, in ways you could not fathom doing in person, and it's all you.

To speak in generalities on blogging, I recently came to a sort of bizarre epiphany. I was thinking about what happens when a person stops posting on their blog. You really have no idea why they stopped: ran out of things to say, lost interest, died. Died is where I came to the interesting dichotomy. I have a passing interest in the macabre hobby of old cemeteries. When you visit a persons grave, you usually have all the vital statistics of a person of exactly when they were born and died, with little but clues as to who they were and how they lived their lives. Conversely, bloggers get into great details sometimes on their view and personal lives, then can disappear into anonymity. Closure is something that rarely seems to happen in the blogosphere.

But I guess the internet and blogging are not going to be a great places for epitaphs for the masses; your virtual life just gets washed over by the flood of information and eventually just gets 'buried' into an archive. A few years ago, after my aunt's passing, I began googling her name and other meaningful things in her life. She had a friend who had predeceased her and I googled his name. I had always known him as loving music, even though he was a dentist. I came across one hit that link sent me into a message board where a person was going into great detail about a coronet (trumpet) he was trying to sell and how it was his dentist's trumpet. He talked about how all the jazz musicians in the 50's in Hackensack NJ would congregate in his dentist's office and play music. He wasn't explicit, but I wonder whether my aunt's friend hung out with people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis (who recorded a record or two in Hackensack). All this is academic now, because the link no longer works, the coronet was either sold or remains in someones attic, and the story is transient and gone from all but some obscure server in some obscure college which probably was erased or archived never to be seen again.

Where was I going with all this? I'm sorry, I was introducing a new blogger to the ether. Her nom de keyboard is Age- a Jersey girl with a lot to say and hopefully won't read into my post as anything but a rant, the impacts of blogging are immediate and far reaching. While the distant future for everyone on the planet is death; what we say and do can have impacts far beyond our own lives. Good luck and make a dent in the real world with your virtual voice.

http://www.autieage.blogspot.com/