Mike English's blog

Following up on the FriendFeed discussion from Robert Scoble‘s post, some interesting questions were raised.

Susan mentioned that Robert was acting as “bionic human socnet filter” after which I asked if we were all becoming part of a social super brain. The discussion turned to the segmentation of the social web with George Smith commenting that:

“Birds of a feather flock together. And sometimes it’s people with polar opposite views arguing. But I don’t think one place really has a large enough spectrum of human discourse…yet. We have to remember there is still a large portion of the population that does not participate in these conversations.”

The web is often hailed as great boon for democracy and learning with freedom of information and global interconnectedness, but I think George makes a good point. The social web is, and tends to be segmented because that’s simply how people are tending to react to the capabilities of the Internet as a new communication medium.

So what brings people together?

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Why am I starting this blog now? Why start a blog at all? Aren’t there enough already?

If my goal was to jump right to the top of the “A-list” heap, starting a blog like this would be the wrong way to do it. But that’s not my goal, not at this point. Right now my goal for this space is more personal than that. I’m exploring what online identity means to me, and I’m creating balance in my life.

Balance? What does tinkering around with blogging and computers have to do with balance?

Easy, it’s my perfect hobby. The last time I really got down to the nuts and bolts of tinkering with something technical was back in highschool when the coolest (geeky) thing I could think to do was dual-booting my self-built PC and compiling unstable gentoo linux kernels with patches for devices most people didn’t have working yet. It made me happy.

Now I’m a fourth year undergraduate student studying theology at a small Midwestern Catholic university who finds most of his free-time spent reading and pondering philosophical dilemmas. While I find this immensely interesting, most of these philosophical dilemmas are as old as time, so pondering them for very long isn’t very satisfying – in fact, it can be downright depressing.

Working on a website like this offers me an opportunity to redirect my excess brainpower toward an activity that will hopefully provide some mild sense of satisfaction.

So here I am, rediscovering my predilection for technogeekery, and exploring new dimensions of self. I couldn’t be happier.