Everyone says it's been a long time so I won't say that it's been a long time...I'll just say tomato

There's this thing about not blogging for a long time. It feels like a friend you really want to see but is too emotionally demanding for a quick coffee or dinner. Once you're in, you're in for the long run, for the long conversation and soon you are riding the long sine curve of jobs, relationships and daily minutae that plunks you right down into a horrible Seinfeldian universe. I don't know why I feel this way about revisiting the blog--people are spilling their guts on a minute by minute basis around the world without any kind of existential crisis about their wordvomit. I think that my hesitancy to blog derives from a sense, that I've developed as a writer, of writing as a largely solitary exercise and a process that takes long, agonizing periods of time to compose any given document. The thing that I'm learning about myself as I write on the blog is that the format is given to immediacy and surface; the ease with which one can generate an account, write a piece and post it has never been easier. It's a really interesting moment in technology and how technology mediates our expression. The questions that are raised in my mind fall along the lines of machine-human interaction and how these interactions are affected by the technology we use to express ourself. I once attended a thesis defense by a friend of mine who was known for his use of the internet and hypermedia techniques in telling stories. He often created and then posted his stories online. During his defense, someone asked him about how technology changed the way he constructed Story. He said that telling stories may not have been possible in the beginning without technology. Language, for one, is a technique for communication developed by early humans. In those days, language became very useful very quickly for a variety of reasons, some having to do with commerce and others having to do with organization, and others dealing with the development of the human mind. So language was the original development that helped us in the attempt to represent the world outside of us. And so we told stories. Then oral storytelling is important for millenia. Sure, we write things down during this time, but by the time alphabets are developed and then that paper is invented and ink, the basic elements of telling a story have been ingrained in us for centuries. Not to mention the idea that writing at first served a purely commercial purpose, counting loaves of bread and tracking deliveries, etc. But then, as my friend pointed out, the novel developed. This was a key moment in the technology of telling Story, because it created a physical form for the words. Once a physical object existed for the words we told each other, that was the day that mythology began to die, my friend said. And now, with what seems like an orgy of new media creation, we begin to wonder if we are simply trying to recreate a form of storytelling that brings back mythos.