Burning up the Screen...

A professor at the Cornell University program for Computing and Informational Science told me once that one of the biggest driving factors in improving technology surrounding the internet is the porno industry. A disgusting but viable truth: When a great percentage of internet users download the stuff on college and company servers, they clog arteries and create the need for bigger bandwidth. Need drives the innovation (always so...).

In recent years, the internet and the blogosphere have begun to have great impact on political and national events. A video posted on Utube and circulated on emails and blogs has lasting impact on the fate of a politician. Opinions glibly scripted on thousands of online journals have the potential to change the way we revere or ignore the nationally syndicated press.

The beauty and bitch of the blogosphere are difficult to separate. The qualities that allow users to create their own voice and use a virtual space to their advantage also allow them to disregard the potential for a very public readership. Ultimately, it comes down to whether the person who sits down at their keyboard feels a responsibility to resist the ease of contributing to useless garbage, harmful slander or plain filth - all too accessible on the net.

For me, making a transition from journal-keeping to blogging requires the simple commitment that the activity would occur daily, a pledge to a potential readership. And the blog, even more so than the journal, must exist in a detached reality - rants structured and veiled, experiences wrapped in external observation, daily activities concealed. But so long as the new venue remains oriented toward personal experience, and away from detached observation of national and international goings on, "Inside the Frame" cannot resemble "Wonkette" or "Instapundit" (examples of some who take the blogosphere by storm).

On the other end of the spectrum from these practically syndicated web logs are those that post what one expects from a young teenager's locked diary (in many cases, the blogger is in fact a rash youth, in other cases one must puzzle over the author's excuse). Examples of the latter are too numerous to count but often include such preambles as "I decided to create this Blog because sometimes all you can do about something is to write about it" or something less premeditated. As much as "Inside the Frame" fails to resemble a popular web-pundit, it fails to resemble these.

Perhaps it was growing up in DC and intrinsically understanding that one does not write (or even sometimes say) what one could not stand seeing in the Washington Post the next day. Perhaps it was growing up Catholic and with a sense of shame that what I wrote might someday be read by my mother or grandmother. Perhaps it was the good horse sense to know that people often forget what's said: "Believe half of what you read and none of what your hear," my grandma always told me. Perhaps it was a combination of all these and many other factors - but I never did understand the brashness that some of my contemporaries exhibit when they record every red letter of activities and thoughts they may later live to regret.