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.

I recently read a couple of books about the Internet, cyberculture and identity especially by Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen. This book is good because it demonstrates an aspect of the Internet life as disruptive. When I read the book, on my way to Kuching to organize an event for my workplace last month, I felt unease. Internet, not all of its technology of course, is disruptive in the sense that it gives opportunities for a user to construct and deconstruct his or her identity. Turkle's research on users of multi-user domains (or MUDs) showed some evidence of 'gender-switching' or 'cross-dressing', for example, as particularly normal. Imagine if 'gender-switching' occurs to teenagers, and the experience might have left an imprint on their life or their identity. And that what is disruptive is the fact that 'simulated identity' is brought to RL or real life. Nonetheless, in other studies, such as by Lynne Roberts and Malcolm Parks (as treated in Green and Adam, Virtual Gender), there is enough evidence that 'gender-switching' at least only occurs among the minority of MUDs users, and not the majority. However, the fact that what is considered 'abnormal' in RL appears to be 'normal' in cyberspace points to the direction that the Internet, as in other human/machine interaction, is a disruptive technology.

Hello world! This site is my second dot five weblog with a new attitude. Well not exactly new, but more serious. I'll attempt to focus on my intellectual rants into the pages here. Hopefully, it will get some audience and at the same time improve my analytical depth which is more important. I have done some blogging at www.xanga.com/adipujangga but I have not been successful in putting serious ideas into it. The site is more of a personal, intimate cries than as social critique. I did put in one or two entries, serious entries, but those are not normal entries. This site is probably a start to something that I want to do for the rest of my life.