Doc picked up on something I’d said earlier, and has provided a number of links to the blogger-as-thinker-and-co-creator space. Well worth a read, with some wonderfully tangential moves.
And all this brings me on to something else. Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe it’s jaded people living jaded lives. But I get the feeling that many people don’t like saying “I agree” or even “I disagree”, much less defending their decision to agree or disagree. This creates a tendency to damn with faint praise, to murmur and snipe rather than to speak out, to take a “the world is my fence and I have every right to sit on it” approach. Wrong, at least in the blogosphere.
Blogs are conversations. Not monologues. It is natural for bloggers to reinforce what is said elsewhere, or to disagree-with-reinforcement, as the ideas develop and enrich and move on. And it is not ego or mutual admiration, but a passion for learning. And improving that learning.