Originally posted on this day, 2009.
Have you ever thought that a blog could be more than just an update of someone's daily life, or a political opinion, or any other left-brain expression? What if a blog could emanate from the right brain? I think about it all the time. In fact, I've thought about it since I first encountered the medium nearly ten years ago, and I've experimented with it. In fact, I continue to experiment with it. I envision spaces on the web that make us reach beyond ourselves in the same way that literature does. Spaces where we explore the world of mind (not thoughts, mind you), a world where intuition creates the reality and invites readers into alternate realities which, in the world of literature are called "fiction"...
Would you feel betrayed if you discovered you were reading the words of a character rather than an actual person? If so, why? Especially if they'd shown you things you'd never seen and had expanded your personal boundaries. Would you resent Anna Karenina, Elinor Dashwood, Mrs. Dalloway, or Huckleberry Finn if you'd first met them on a blog, only to discover they were characters and not actual people?
The brain does not differentiate between real and imagined events. Imagine that! In your brain, you've actually flown on Eagles' wings with Hobbits. You've floated down the Mississippi on a raft and you've fought alongside King Arthur. How marvelous is that?
The problem is, most people are programmed (or choose) to be literal beings. Or at least that's what they've become in the black and white "real" world that the establishment defends, sometimes to the death. I've always pushed these boundaries and I've never hesitated to share what I've discovered. Yes, there's a place for the left-brain blog—we need that connection with reality—but we need fantasy as well. What I envision are spaces where we get our daily dose of imagination as well.
I think that a blog can be a book. Notice that I didn't say LIKE a book, where you read an online doc file. I think that a blog can BE a book, where the story takes place in real time. How many times have you read a wonderful story, only to dread having to say goodbye to the characters when you finished it? What if you could meet those characters on a blog, where they speak for themselves without the stranglehold of plot, form, and the constraint of linear, numbered time/pages? What if you could read the story as it happens through the characters' thoughts, not as an observer through an observer?
It might be pretty cool.
I believe that what we call "blogging" will not die. I think that it is, like any new form of communication, in its embryonic stage and that it will evolve just as literature and art have evolved. It will have to, or it will die.
