Our Cognitive Surplus

I’ve just spent some time making friends with the ‘next’ button. Essentially it jumps you randomly to another blog hosted on WordPress. There are a lot of blog on wordpress, I’ve only ever randomly jumped to a blog I’ve looked at before once. The reason I like the ‘next’ button is that around the next corner could be a great surprise. Someone that thinks like I do, or someone to converse with. That’s how I found some of the interesting blogs in my blog roll, mainly ‘Greetings Earthlings’ – which was actually quite an early discovery. Mike Poole is interesting because we’re on the same page about fundamental values and opinions, but we see different ways of realising them. That’s pretty much perfect, you get conversation without dogmatism. Hurrah!

WordPress as a per cent

Browsing around WordPress it seems blogs fall into some pretty generic categories. If you selected 10 blogs at random 5 of them would be expressly about religion. I don’t have anything to say to people who let religion consume their lives, so that’s not of much interest to me. 2 of those 10 blogs are in foreign languages. Again not much use. 1 will be by someone who is genuinely crazy, just sporadically and chaotically spamming words onto the page. If you imagine this breakdown as a pie chart, the remaining 20% includes a huge amount of diversity. Some business. Some photography collections. Some people keeping a diary. I try to leave a comment on the coherent ones.

Internet and Community

People often say that the internet brings niche groups together. If you had a tiny minority interest prior to the internet you’d never find someone with the same interest. Even if you walked past such a person in the street, it wasn’t practical to walk around saying “I’m a furry” to everyone you see. You’d be ridiculed. The internet, however, allows you to get on a soap-box and scream it to the world. This is pretty brilliant if you’re a furry.

This idea of community forming is pretty much why I’m online. I’m searching for people who broadly share the same world view as me. Problem is that it’s much harder than it seems. Furries are in business because there is some obvious label that unities them. They can unite behind the banner and their community can form. Furries might have diverse political or religious beliefs, but they can be communal around their Furryness. Religious people, as WordPress proves, also are in business. Being religious speaks to a lot more than your articles of faith. Religious commonality also conjoins with similar social views, similar politics, similar morals and all other kinds of things. Religion is an organised pigeon hole.

None of this is working for me. The acknowledged problem with this blog is that I don’t have a clearly defined topic. I want to talk about whatever tickles my world view at the moment. I don’t really want to blog if I’m not free to do that. I can’t unite behind a single-issue banner like being a furry (note: I’m not a furry).

I also don’t fall into one of these pigeon holes. I suppose the best pigeon holes would be ‘atheist’ or ‘law student’. I identify with these concepts on a sort of deep level. But they’re not categories with homogeneous values.

Solutions?

Two options:

1) I keep pressing the ‘next’ button and hope.

2) I try and divide my world-view up into the 10 (or so) different issues I identify with on a deeper level and then try and find or build matching communities.

Any ideas?