feeling listless

Gang-related I've never been part of a group. Or, rather to qualify that I've never been part of a specific group with a name -- I've never been 'a [insert team sport team name here] supporter'. I've never been a profession of type -- when I was offered the chance to be a 'librarian' I ran away like a madman into a string of jobs until my current one in a call centre but what's that? Call Centre Advisor -- that's a description not a grouping. Even at school I was never sporto, motorhead, geeks, slut, pinhead, dweeby, wonker or rich. No one adored me. I wasn't a 'righteous dude'. I don't miss anything in this. I've spent large proportions of my life alone and probably still will (although I'm no loner, I love the company of people).

I'm telling you all this because something strange happened today. The Metafilter t-shirt I ordered from Cafepress arrived. It sits on a hanger on the back of my door right now, brilliant white with the blue 'M', gold 'F' printed impressively on the front. For that brief moment I felt some vague community spirit -- I felt part of a group. I'm a weblogger. The closest comparison I can think of is people wearing shirts for their favourite rock band. My query is -- why do I feel a connection to this virtual place full of people I've never met, something which only feeds the sense of sight and not sound, touch or smell. It's frankly a bit unnerving that I'd got through the rest of my life with all these real world opportunities but this one thing is at the other end of the modem. I'm not worried for myself, I bought the shirt for ironic reasons more than anything else, and I hardly visit Mefi that much anymore, it's more a worry for everyone else who spends too much time at these sites. Are they substituting the beauty and possibilities of the real world for an imaginary place online which can only, eventually leave them slightly disappointed. It's link getting to the end of a film on video and the tape running out. There is only so far you can take it. Even with attachments.

I suppose I'm wondering whether the amount of time anyone spends on-line actually repays in the real world -- does this time balance out karmacally with those moments when our fingers aren't at the keyboard. Is this the sort of group you want to be a part of, one whose connections aren't physical. Clearly in some cases it does -- weblogger marriages, for example, but much of the time it feels like a creative black hole. Looking over some weblog directories and seeing all of the pages which have been shutdown by the writers because they've decided there are better things to do, I wonder if this a phase everyone online goes through. I wonder if the effort I put in here is worth the hits I get per day. I think this is what priests call 'a crisis of conscience' -- will I be letting you all down if I do stop writing here every other day? Will this all be missed? Am I a 'vital' part of this group?

It's stream of consciousness Friday everyone. What I think I'm asking is would you mind if people stopped updating their weblogs quite so regularly? If I updated once a week say, but with as many entries anyway, but fresher because I won't be rushing through them at eleven-thirty in the evening. If I appointed a day each week when you’ all would know that I'd be updating? Or would all this be breaking the weblogger's code? It would nice to hear your thoughts on this -- you can email via the 'comments' tab on this entry. This isn't something I'm going to do straight away -- just being speculative.