The Shape of Our Community

AKMA has reconceived his blogroll as a new university, the U of Blogaria.

Jeneane has imagined a new Walden populated with the bloggers who have come to matter to her.

It isn’t surprising that these tropes come from two of our most passionate, warmest bloggers. AKMA and Jeneane’s metaphors give shape to the community — and, for once, that is the right word — that blogging allows. Odd that blogging, a literary form that looks to the outside observer like the most self-gratifying form of self-expression, turns out to be a way for us to be with one another.

On the other hand, this is only odd because ever since the invention of that large capital expense know as the printing press, writing has been a one-to-many broadcast. Now at last writing is a collaborative experience; we’re seeing an Hegelian “synthesis” of the self-assertion of writing and the mutuality of conversation. We are, in short, writing ourselves into existence together.

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