What have we learnt from blogging?

By the end of this month, I would have being blogging for one year. It has been fun and I met a lot of new people online, people whom I do not even know how they look like. I have shared information, argued, confronted and sometimes ''deleted them. I also have made some friends. I became very up todate with the latest information and happenings around the world. From the numerous links, I have became aware of how much information there is available at a click of a mouse, if you know where and how to find it.

Alan Jacobs comments in his article, Goodbye, Blog in the May/June 2006 issue of Books & Culture: A Christian Review that blogs are " the friend of information but the enemy of thought."

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There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant,
the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly,
and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with
sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies
like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely
conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution
of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and
for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the
enemy of thought.
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What Jacobs wrote bears thinking about as we surf the web daily for information to update our blogs for readers we do not know, for information that may not be accurate, for opinions that may not be informed and from people who hide their true identities.

How do we overcome the architecture of the blog to making it conducive to thinking rather than just information presentation? How do we become reflective thinkers rather than information brokers? We need to think about it if our blogging is to become a missional activity rather than an addiction.

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