Blogging: A justification of why I'm doing this, and an introduction to me.

I'm going to start adding interesting links and commenting on some of the little things I'm thinking about that I've found in my travels on the internet.

As a child, my mother tried to get me to keep a diary, but I refused thinking "If a diary's for me, why write one? I'll remember the important things".

As an adult, I still don't keep a diary to remember the private things I think or feel, but I also am smart enough to know that we actually probably don't remember 1/10th, or maybe even 1/100th of what we think about on a daily basis.

Couple that with the fact that we are bombarded with endless information and news and commentary, and I've come to the realization that there's probably a positive role for recordkeeping that's not just work-related in my life.

Part of the problem I personally have with blogging is that I feel there is an element lacking in humility in sharing one's personal observations and thoughts with an audience.

Or maybe I just think it's rude to assume people care what any other person is thinking enough to want to read about it.

So I start "blogging" with an element of doubt and uncomfortability (is that actually a word?).

Not that I find my inner thoughts dull, on the contrary, they keep me endlessly amused and stimulated, but I've lived for a long time being entertained and interested by my own thoughts and observations without assuming that others will as well.

We all find ourselves and our hobbies and our work and the world we've created and our personal concerns interesting and riveting, but quite often find those of others to be entirely lacking in inspirational qualities.

From about the age of 18, I spent 10 years flying in airplanes and riding on trains and traveling and walking and living and experiencing and sitting down at random times and places and talking to the people I'd happened upon. It was, to me, a rich and textured life and I don't regret a moment of it.

As a matter of fact, I'm quite pleased I managed to find a life for myself in a different country and learn and experience what I did.

During that time I wasn't much of a computer user.I didn't grow up "chatting" or IMing friends, or being on AOL and "lol"-ing.I did text message friends on my cell phone when I lived in Japan, but it was a matter of ease and not a culture for me.

Several years ago, in a class taught by one of my favorite professors at my university (Professor Seori Takahashi �������D�搶) I wrote a paper lamenting the advancement of electronic devices as a communication medium.

(Ah, our University days when we think our thoughts are great ones and that we were the first person ever to have them..)

Not that I was bothered by the ease, but I was bother by the transitory qualities of it. The fact that it all seemed so temporary.

I was bothered by the idea that young boys and girls wouldn't have a drawer or a box filled with the little notes they passed to each other in class like I do, or shoe boxes filled with letters handwritten by friends and family.

I was bothered by the idea that the "Love letter" might become obsolete.

I wondered how this generation of IMers and e-mailers and text messagers would have the paper trail of memories left behind, that are so important to me, if every little bit of communicating they did disappeared with a newer technology, a better cell-phone, or just because they dropped their PDA in the toilet accidentally.
(C'mon now, we've all done that at least once. Right? Right?)

I do realized that this sounds hypocritical coming from a person who didn't want to keep a written dairy, but while I never felt the need to keep proof of my own thoughts, I value the written paper mementoes of my relationships with others.

And maybe that's just how people felt when the telephone first started becoming the communication means of choice.

Worrying that our need for ease and speed in communications technology would somehow affect the depth of our communications.

And yet oddly enough, just a few years later, I find my inspiration, my world, and most of my travels now involve airports and trains less and computer monitors and cat5 cables and routers and DNS servers more, and I find it equally as fascinating, as textured and political and personal and varied as the life I led when I went places instead of bringing those places to me.

I probably spend upwards of 14 hours a day either online or in front of a computer.
I boot it up and spend hours in a universe that is not real, but very real to me at the same time.

It is how I earn a living, where I go to meet friends, and how I buy most of what I need instead of combing the little back alleys of areas I'd never been to before hoping to find something new, something interesting, and yet at the same time, it's not terribly different in a way.

We can shop, we can learn, we can study, we can meet and make friends from anywhere in the world as long as we can type the same language and have an internet connection.

One of the things that fascinates me about the internet is the fact that you can go anywhere as long as you know it's there, or, more importantly, how to get there. You can go anywhere as long as you know which letters and numbers and symbols you need to type into the address bar to take you there.

This is what I do as a career.
I find ways of making sure people can find and are brought to the websites I want them to go to using the power of the internet.

(We call this "S.E.M.", or "Search Engine Marketing". )

I will probably often include links about Search Engine issues and internet related issues because this is the world I live in now and what I find interesting.Please forgive me if you don't find it as interesting as I do.

What I do is study and analyze the major "maps" on the internet, or Search Engines, the place people generally go to look for the places they want to go in cyber-space (ugh, I hate that word), and find ways to get my client's websites on that map and to make the destination they will be brought to a place they actually want to go.
(Down with Spam! Down with sucky websites!)

Unlike a real map though, it's a fluid and ever-changing, ever-growing map with new worlds and communities and real estate popping up daily, and quite often disappearing just as quickly.There is something beautiful about how impermanent it is and yet at the same time scary.

We've spent our history as humans erecting monuments to ourselves in the hopes that we will become immortal, or at least to make ourselves feel like there is an element of permanence in our existence.

Erecting buildings and statues and drawing lines on maps to mark off our boundaries and creating religions and nationalities and political parties all to give ourselves definition, to give ourselves a feeling that what we do and who we are is something definable and solid.

We take comfort in knowing that Paris is Paris and London is London and that they will "always" be there if we decide to visit.

We generally fear change and dislike the unfamiliar even though we know we shouldn't and we fight it in ways we probably aren't even aware of.

We don't like it when they change the line-up of television programs even if it involves them getting rid of the terrible and trying something new, or when our familiar newscasters are replaced with the newer models.

We even get upset when they change the layout of a grocery store we've grown accustomed to even if the new layout makes more sense.

But now we've gone and created a huge world, an alternate universe that is based on change and growth and lack of boundaries and that is hard to define and that is temporary and vastly unexplored.

I often wonder if the internet will change us and make us more used to change and less rigid with our mental boundaries and less wanting the seemingly basic need for stability, or if we will find more and more ways to make it conform to it, and our pressing need to feel that what we do and who we are and the things around us are solid and stable even though every earthquake and war and hurricane and life in general keep trying to let us know it's not.

Will we focus on "conquering the internet" like we've spent our history as humans "conquering nature"?

And how successful will we be at it?

Or will we just go along making laws and rules and building enough of an online culture that we will convince ourselves we've conquered it?

Like we convince ourselves over and over again that we've done with the physical environment we live in.

And will it prove to be, like nature, something that ebbs and flows and grows and changes at it's own pace or spurred on by our actions, but ultimately something to not be conquered in fact, something we must find a way to live in harmony (hello, I hate this word too) as well?

Because we've not yet proven to be able to do that with nature, to accept that while we are part of it, we really aren't in control of it.

We are seriously slow learners as an animal living on this planet when it comes to that one lesson.

Or did we create it because we couldn't "conquering nature" like we've set out to do since the start of time, and have decided to create a world that we could, in fact, control?

I feel I'll have answers to this in some years and will enjoy watching how it plays out.

And while this may not be interesting to you, I personally feel immensely lucky to be able to watch this from the outside, but to also be a part of it in the same way I felt lucky in the first stage of my adult life to be able to observe Japan from the inside while being and "outsider" as well.

The second stage of my adult life is being carried out in a similar manner, but online.