Has Wayne gone completely off the deep end this time? Well, it was to be expected sooner or later, you suppose. Of course, before you judge me totally out to lunch, let's look at the concept of family type relationship building a bit more closely.
In fact, the idea is not as outlandish as it appears at first, or to provide a bit more leeway, the second or sixteenth glance. Blogs do help create, nurture, and build internet families. In fact, business relationship building is a generally accepted benefit of business blogs. It's only a small step to creating other forms of interpersonal relationships as an outgrowth of blogging.
There now, was that leap of faith so hard?
In the modern world, you hear every day that people are beoming more disconnected from their neighbours. No one knows anyone around them, except for a small coterie of friends, or perhaps some work and business associates. It's possible to live beside a neighbour for many years, and never ever meet anyone in that home or apartment. In the past, communities were more stable, over longer periods of time. People had time to know and develop close ties with the people around them.
Today's fast paced world has made those bygone days a distant and fading memory. Like some faded black and white or sepia tinted photograph from a long ago time, the days of knowing all of your neighbours, their children, and even their cousins twice removed, are over.
Or are they?
The internet has created a new and exciting medium for developing friendships, and even extended family. The bloggers, as always, are on the forefront of the new family building revolution. Blogging is personal by nature, and the best business bloggers recognize that aspect of blogging. Blogs are personal and blogs are informational. Mostly, blogs are conversational and build relationships.
Many pundits have remarked that blogs are simply online diaries. In the sense that blogs are written from a personal point of view, that's true in the strictest sense. Of course, the online diary definition only considers the writer. Moving beyond that confining blog description, the world of interpersonal relationships develops, as bloggers meet other bloggers.
Distant bloggers are often brought together by an interest in topics, often thought arcane and on the very edges of reason, by members of the mainstream. Some blogging connections are developed from more traditional roots like business, politics, law, technology, sports, and the various creative hobbies.
Blogging communities have sprung up, like dandelions on the front lawn, on a warm spring afternoon. Like minded bloggers communicate with one another, first by by commenters and by e-mails. Later, the friendship passes to the telephone and to live and in person meetings.
Over time, these meetings and discussions blossom into more than simple friendships. Marriages, business partnerships, and yes...extended virtual internet families are often the direct result of maintaining a blog. Blogs create community through conversation, serving a similar social function to other community institutions in the past.
Bloggers have become one of the new family and relationship paradigms of the Twenty-First Century. While other forms of community building have occurred on the internet, few achieve virtual family status as quickly as do like minded bloggers.
Yes, Virginia, blogs do build families.
Really closeknit blogging families too, and you are probably part of one, and didn't even know it.
