The Verbal Commons

Historically, I have not been a big user of Internet community applications. I looked at chat rooms years ago, but my impression was a large number of people in a noisy room, with pairs attempting to talk across a large room to each other. Not my idea of discourse.

I have been a member of a number of special interest discussion groups that have shown to have a lot less noise than chat rooms, but they tend to be cliquish. If you are a trusted member, things are great. If you are an infrequent poster or lurker, the results can be less than satisfactory. Typically, you can be restricted from posting through moderation (with some of the flames that occur on a discussion group, I can understand why), or it can be difficult to get a respectful response from the other members.

The result is that I have been a loyal user of email as the primary communication tool. However, this too has its limitations in that the community is self-selecting--one chooses who can read and who to interact. And there can be disagreements and flames even in that medium. The pro is that an intelligent discourse can take place, although asynchronously.

After looking through the blogs over the last couple of weeks and reviewing some blogs of acquaintences of mine, I thought I would give this medium a try. I'm not sure what to expect, but it seems that the blog approach is good for capturing thoughts whether to publish publically, or to use as a parking place to random thoughts.

Therefore, I present the Peripheral Futurist blog. Through this blog, hopefully I will be able to communicate my perspectives on developments impacting how we live, how we work, and how we survive--in the future. By virtue of the fact that I have started this blog, I believe that this type of publishing will become a dominant approach for the statement, documentation, and challenge of ideas, experiments, thoughts, and concepts. Obviously some of you have more experience than I. I would be very interested in your experiences--both pro and con--with the blogosphere.

Walt