that google search bar, part 2

Spent considerable time last night clicking on the "next blog" button. The intensely personal content of many of the blogs caught me off guard. Assuming the majority of blogs I looked at were American (on blogger.com, I think that's a safe assumption), and assuming what goes on in the hearts and minds of American bloggers isn't significantly different from what goes on in the hearts and minds of non-blogging Americans (perhaps a less safe assumption), we Americans are a pretty alienated bunch. Not that I didn't know it already, but random blog-surfing certainly drove the point home. I encountered more than one blogger leaving notes along the lines of "why don't I just end it all now?", other bloggers who alluded to physical abuse from significant others, accounts of failed relationships and devastating divorce settlements, tales of working humiliating and low-wage jobs to keep from sinking too far below the poverty line. No Jerry Springer sideshows but quite a lot of real, unmediated misery. And then there were the scary right-wing pundit blogs and blogs from the religious right . . .

On the other hand, if alienation is largely conditioned by solitude -- in turn (re)enforced by TV, work, ideology, geography, and anything else that keeps our attention focused strictly within the limits of the worlds we inhabit daily -- then maybe that "next blog" button has a radical and profoundly democratic potential. The trauma of crashing into and through one another's worlds may be worthwhile if it means that we start to get to know or maybe even talk to one another.