It takes a lot to be insanely connected in the blogging world. Not just to experience it, to be entertained by it, but to interact with it, to be absorbed by it, and, yes, to be fully immersed in it. It's more of a complex addiction cycle than anything else - intermittent positive reinforcement is what we seek. Something as simple as a comment, or a page view count, takes on enormous significance. We go to extraordinary lengths to secure that exposure; striving for retweets, building up a follower count, striking up "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" deals with fellow bloggers... Sometimes, a comment we'll receive will feel golden. That's why we blog. That's why we tweet. We build our networks, we look forward to those comments, those once-in-a-while elements of feedback that astonish us, that we treasure as validation that someone out there is taking notice of what we do.
Scheduling, remoting, control by email, from mobile devices... so many components out there, to build into some Rube Goldberg publishing contraption, attempting to get those posts out there, to be read. It's a thoroughly daunting proposition. There seems an infinity of tools to do so. With all the technology, all the features, all the capabilities that the Internet gives us; with all the stress placed on measures of our success; with all our own, psychological prejudices when it comes to measuring our own worth, it's easy to forget what our efforts should be all about. Surrounded by tools, it's all too easy to forget that we're here to write. It doesn't matter what we write about; what genre, what style. We're putting ourselves into it, and to simply reduce this to a mechanical publishing exercise is doing ourselves a grave injustice. It's about still being human. Let's not forget that. To be here for any other reason, that's insane.
