Adventures in Egotism

Ok, yeah. It can be. That’s why I’ve decided to start with a philosphical commitment. Like why am I doing this?

The main reason is that I want to develop my public voice. I keep a journal , I write missives to friends, I instant message on occasion. But these are all dialectic. Which is well and good, but… I want to practice something more disciplined. I want to learn to construct lucid prose without the feedback loop of interaction. In normal discourse, you can observe the other interlucutor at all times, continuously evaluating interest and comprehension. You have your online model of the other person’s mind to guide you. But writing to a public forum is a different skill. It requires creating a generalized model of your audience. Though some famous author said that anything worth reading was written for one person. I guess I want to explore that idea.

I also want to explore the social context of writing. What happens when your words are available in perpuity, instantly cross-referencable to all aspects of your digital presence? I’m particularly sensitive to this since my name is a 6-letter unique identifier. If you google for “turadg”, it’s all me. And anyone browsing through all my web spilth will construct a version of me. I’m not entirely comfortable with that. So that’s another part of this experiment.

And another is joining this abstract community of bloggers and net-smiths. I am just amazed by the tools people are putting out there and I am compelled to play with them. I installed Movable Type this morning and it’s awesome. About an hour ago I filed myself in the GeoURL ICBM Address Server. it’s a beatuiful thing.

Here’s what I hope this isn’t: pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Please berate me if that happens.