I was reading Steven Jones Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety that I came across similar deliberation on the 'estrangement' aspect of the Internet involving 'reading' as a refuge activity, a lonely activity. My contention about weblogging as a lonely activity can be put in this same light. Jones wrote that "Hogart's 'old men' did not become estranged from those around them because of the reading-room, or because of reading. They visit the reading-room because it is their refuge, a place to be among others of the same lot. It is in a word, their consolation. But it is a place to be among and not with, in terms of interaction." (p.14) Subsitute if you can reading with weblogging or weblog or blogging. It means the same, and it serves all the while my contention about the whole issue of loneliness and refuge in the activities of webloggers online in the east and the west.

I've contemplated on finding Sherry Turkle on the net since I bought her book Life on the Screen. But, I could not find time or did not remember to pop up my Google screen and type s-h-e-r-r-y-t-u-r-k-l-e. I only did find one of her friends (probably) student, Amy Bruckman, and found her site at Georgia Tech site. See, they are geniuses while I am not, and they both belong to Harvard, while I am not; and they are both female, while I am not; and they are both white, while I am not too. So in terms of 'hegemony', I am not in the class of them. Yesterday, I found Sherry Turkle, just like the film Finding Forrester or Good Will Hunting... it was like finding a genius, a brilliant mind around. I found Sherry at http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/ and there I found her only photo. Wow, what a mysterious genius. What a beauty, at least from that 800x600 pixel interface. Her picture is smaller than that probably160x196 pixel and in black and white. Sorry, if I wronged the colors, as I am color blind. See, I was expecting a lot from her site. Of which I was disappointed, huge blopper I guess. Now, Amy Bruckman's site is better than her teacher, or mentor, or I-am-not-sure-what-relationship-they-both-had (you know in the Sack's MCD-membership categorization device-kinda world). I was hunting for some 'beyond-life-on-screen' papers but I am disappointed. Maybe, I would call Copernic to search for her again, and I will do that once I recover from the disappointment of finding Sherry Turkle on the net... Wow, what a genius, but what a mystery, what a disappointment! See Forrester was a disappointment before he read the 'Finding Family' piece as a finale; see Will Hunting was a disappointment before he found his way to California after receiving doses of reality-shaken pyschological jabs from the Southie shrink... I am in the league of believing that Sherry Turkle might be a disappointment (in that I don't know her except from her book that I loved so much) before the geniuses in her surface not now but probably later when Technology and Self becomes so much a sought-after subject area not in America alone but also in remote Malaysia.

I have not read any of Putnam's Bowling Alone or Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, but I bet "blogging alone" on the Internet would recall such loneliness in the title and content of both books. I will someday read both, but let me rant on this loneliness as a character of modernity and that blogging as a new modern (or probably post-modern) technology (and therefore an artifact) embodies such loneliness. With Norbert Elias's idea of process and society as processual, I view that society's incessant movement to acquire civility, much of the private parts/activities of the member of society may surface so as to align themselves with civility that the society has acquired or as to depict a certain kind of diversion (or deviation) to the course of civilizing. In the old days (well yesterday is also old conceptually), diary (and its adjacent activity, writing a journal/an entry in the diary) is wholly a private activity. To a certain extent, if we are to use Elias's "civilizing" conceptualization, diary reflects civility since its beginning in the modern world (whatever inexact date it was). Like the structure of court politics (in Elias's The Civilizing Process), a member of the court maintains its civility via habits and rituals in accordance with the emperor's routine, and that uniqueness is maintained through deviation in private from emperor's hawking gaze. Meaning, in public, one follows court politics; in private, one follows individuality; and both are forms of civilizing acts (and hence part of civilizing process). In contemporary, Internet-age world, "blogging" as a new form of writing entry into one's diary is an act of individuality. One is lonely when it comes to writing an entry. One is lonely when it comes to putting one thoughts into one's own enclosed world. One is lonely when the entry will be understood in depth only by oneself. Blogging is just too personal. The contradiction lies in the nature of blog sites. On one level, it is private; but in another, it is public as it is also read by some friends and strangers. In modernity, one does not intrude into private enclaves. In post-modernity where everything is deconstructed, one's privacy can be publicized, gain meaning, and to the extreme, be political. But that is just the social impact of "blogging", a group impact. To persons, one is still alone and lonely in doing it.