Student of McLuhan that I am — aren’t we all? — I love to ponder how my use of this new medium, the blog, affects my thought patterns.
Usually I do weird new technological things for reasons I’m not fully aware of at the time. The lack of conscious awareness of its meaning is an essential aspect of any of new medium.
As a practical matter, it could be that by blogging, I’m doing research for Mathematicians in Love. That is, I can see some of my characters becoming bigtime lifeboxers or lifebloggers. I have a feeling Nokia has trademarked “lifeblog” but I like the word a lot, maybe more than my coinage “lifebox.” I guess the lifebox is the hardware, and the lifeblog is the content. The software is “Jenny,” like in Freeware? Naw, I need a better word for that code, which is embedded in the lifebox. Blogware.
I see my character Bela as wearing a ring with a camera in it, and that’s how he gets big. The win with putting the camera in a ring (as opposed to a brooch) is that then the users can see the lifeblogger. Just have a fisheye lens in there, and trust the blogware to run some Eric-Gullichsen-style anamorphic algorithm to flatten out the image or, better yet, to let the user put their virtual eye at the ring and look all over the place. Anamorphocam blogware. Generally it’s wise to wear the blog-ring on the opposite hand from the hand that you use for the more intimate duties. Uneasy rests the hand that wears the blog-ring.
And now strum a classic SF god-chord: Bela’s lifeblog wakes up and starts doing things.