It's basically a balancing act.

I didn't really intend to reread my thesis as preparation for writing this column. A number of ideas and references that I wanted to find for this column, however, turned out to be from those pages. And if I'm already reading ... well, I found myself rereading quite a bit, and quite honestly, enjoying it.

There was also, however, logic in returning to those pages, and to numerous others within the Boidem. Over the years I've used a variety of terms to describe this project. Within the introduction to the thesis, for instance, I wrote:
The Boidem started out as a public web site devoted to the examination of topics related to hypertext and the internet, and computing in general, and as it developed it became a framework into which I could tie my own experience. Perhaps in the end what I have is a personal web site through which I filter my own experience, disguised as a public forum devoted to examining issues of public interest.
To my mind that's still an accurate description of what I've tried to do in these pages. But from a slightly different perspective, those same sentences can perhaps be read as the journal of a passage - the passage of an immigrant from the print-on-paper old country into a digital new world. Whatever interest that journal held (and may perhaps still hold) is the product of my attempts to make sense of this new world with the understandings and perceptions that I've brought with me from the old. Immigrants are more capable of appreciating the opportunities that the internet offers for an intermingling and an enmeshing of the personal and the public. Natives may not even notice that these are two traditionally separate spheres. Immigrants, attuned to the traditional rhythms of linear writing, are in a position to realize the poly-rhythmic possibilities of thought development that reside within hypertext while natives may only view that same hypertext as no more than a faster beat that still leads in a pre-determined direction.

The Boidem has, over the years, perhaps been taking the easy route of reporting to other immigrants what I've seen along my journey into this new world. The more difficult, and much more urgent, task, should be to describe that world to the natives so that they won't take it for granted. If they do take it for granted they won't be able to realize its true potential.


Go to: Just sitting and reading for a few minutes can't hurt, or
Go to: No lack of additional culprits, or
Go to: A function of structure?,
Go to: Dr. Who?, or
Go to: Can we every feel at home?, or
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old country