Breaking News: New Guy Tries Blogging

I sit here with trembling fingers, about to embark on a small step for a man...and even smaller step for mankind.

If this were 5 years ago, the term blogger might have had some prestige. Get a front row seat at the political conventions, have access to private media chat rooms or the like. Now it is someone that can't get their thoughts together in 140 characters so they need a whole blog to get a point across. I mean now a days a long conversation is when you have to tweet 3 times.

In general, as a family-type of person, I don't like the whole social media thing. Relationships are not supposed to be had behind a key board, they should be built face-to-face. Ideas are not supposed to be told, they should be discussed. And a friend is someone you go out for coffee with, not 650 of the closest people you might have been standing in an elevator with.

I think the more we become attached to our devices, the more we want to separate from them. The attraction (even addiction) of the latest email buzzing in our pocket, or a new friend request lighting up our purse, is all fun at the moment. But when we sit down for dinner (hopefully with the phone off) or lay in bed alone with our thoughts, we crave real human interaction.

Friendship used to mean dinner together. The invention of the telephone allowed us to talk more often and to more people but it also minimized the dinner dates. The onset of email allows us to chat often now, but we've lost the sound of each other's voice. Texting made communication instantaneous and unlimited but also meanigless (and full of typos).

But the flip side of the negative is the potential that mass communication brings. An easy phone call to a parent, a quick clarification email to a co-worker or finding an old friend on Facebook.

Blogging brought us a more open political discourse, pictures of your neighbor's latest BBQ and everyone thinking that the world wants to hear their opinion.

So I would like to think that this blog will be a drop different. Not just more noise on the web's billions of pages, but some inspirational insights in the small biosphere called Commack.

And like any politician who speaks of how terrible the government is and therefore says "elect me to go fix it," and then when he is elected he goes and proves the point about how dysfunctional they are...I am going to try and turn the whole blogosphere upside down by writing personal slices of life here in Commack that I find meaningful. 

Well, it is also part of my job, but that is for another time.