CONFESSIONS OF A BASEMENT BLOGGER

Frontiers have been beckoning all throughout the history of humanity. That deep river or high mountain or vast ocean just up ahead. Seems as if we're genetically encoded to be afraid yet curious. So desperately curious we simply have to conquer it. Especially Americans whose history began as a series of new frontiers from our Eastern settlements along the Atlantic, eventually across the wide Missouri, and finally the towering Rockies to the Pacific.

Frontiers, however, exist and beckon not only in a geographic sense. There are also the frontiers of the mind. Modern man has used physics to probe what's on the earth, in the skies, and now in outer space. But there is still so much of inner space yet to be conquered. So if physics was our field of choice in the last century, biology will be in this century. Which is why our best neuro-biologists are in a state of perpetual frontier-crossing when it comes to our brain circuitry, our genes, and all the endless codes locked inside us.

But a funny thing happened on the way to progress...!

Usually it's been a straight-line advancing from simpler to more extraordinary. Yet one of these lines may have begun wobbling lately. One of these neuro-biological advances may have run into trouble. Our progress in the field of human communication.

What started as grunts advanced into language, language into writing, writing into printing, then printing into the mass media of newspapers, radio, television and now the Internet. Amazing stuff, all this. And at a quick glance, pretty impressive.

But now here's where the straight-on, frontier-crossing line may wobble. The medieval church was wrong to resist the acquisition of reading on the part of the masses. However, what about the acquisition of publishing on the part of the masses? It sounds so democratic. It seems to fulfill the ideal of every-citizen-a-vote-and-a-voice.

And yet, as I publish these words -- and am called by some a citizen-journalist -- I hesitate. Journalism has long been deemed a sacred profession in which facts and truth are supposed to be the North Star. Researchers and editors are always on hand to check and balance what gets published. But no one censors me. Nor the other hundred million personal & corporate websites.

And so we have either reached the apotheosis of democracy, with every one of us having instant access to the screens and minds of a million fellow citizens....or we have forged an enormous electronic hammer which allows any one of us to pound every nail we happen to see. Or imagine. Or concoct.

Sure I like to "publish" like this. As does anyone who wants to inform or dis-inform, praise or discredit, rally and lead. But here's haunting question: How many of us are crying 'fire' in this enormously crowded new theatre...?