Fragments From Floyd

In July, 2003, I was secretly delighted to find out my weblog had even made the "ratings" at all. This, even back in the early days when there were, if I'm remembering correctly, only about 50K blogs listed in the Truth Laid Bear Blogging ecosystem. Somewhere near the very end, I qualified (by whatever arcane formulae are used to calculate this, and three years later, I'm still clueless) as an Insignificant Microbe. I pretended to take offense:

I feel compelled to voice my resentment at the reference by innuendo on behalf of my kindred corpuscles that our weblogs are 'mere microbes' at the bottom of the food chain. That this blogger and associated blogs are AT THE BOTTOM, there can be no debate. But microbes! Please!

Call it hubris, but I consider myself higher than the microbe level, much higher....more on the order of a rotifer, tardigrade, or gastrotrich....perhaps not sentient in the InstaPundit way, but multicellular, by gosh....way beyond the level of staphylococcus.

And I think I speak for other hierarchy-impaired bloggers who hope one day, after regurgitating the crumbs that trickle down from the Top Feeders above, to one day grow into truly macroscopic creatures....flatworm, flukes, leeches!

Yes, we are small and insignificant, and the higher feeders swallow hundreds of us with their corn flakes every morning, but we ARE NOT MICROBES, and its time we took a stand:

We are M.A.D! Multicellular And Defiant! MADBLOGGERS! All for one and all about nothing in particular!!

There, I feel better. Think I'll go take a bath in a drop of pond water.

After three years of early morning writing in indifference to the drifting of continents, impact of meteors or rise of the terrible lizards, Fragments lives into the present era. Survival of the fittest? I think not. I attribute the evolutionary staying power of this blog far more to chance than to design, to blissful ignorance rather than to intelligence. I now have a backbone and walk upright, a TLB Large Mammal. Why is it that I feel at times more like an insignificant microbe than ever, one among the millions of blogs whose numbers grow by 30,000 a day? Why blog against nature red in tooth and claw?

I think the motivation to write and read blogs comes from the knowledge that each of those 30K new blogs are not as alike as peas in a pod or staphylococcus in a petrie dish. Each is as unique as the DNA of its author, a phenotypic expression of personality, experience and purpose. But subject to the selection pressures of real life, 999 out of 1000 of these newly evolving blogs will be born to die, to go extinct in two months, lacking the fitness--whatever odd ingredient that is, after all--to thrive, grow, compete. But some will live, propagate ideas and grow synaptic networks with like minds in a living net of words.

Meanwhile, some of us old-timers persist, in spite of the odds and without a clue where this adventure in emerging diversity will carry us. But it feels more and more as if the future is not merely a matter of my individual survival as a blogger. It feels as if there are forces at work, beyond our private purposes or personalities, that are shaping blogs-as-organism. Perhaps we are on our way in some strange lineage toward becoming a collective multinucleate creature possessing powers and properties for change we could not imagine as mere microbes. Could it be that the Grand Scheme calls for something like this potentially-cooperative syncytium of voices to draw us back from the brink of the abyss? Will blogs united become a force of natural selection in human history?

Who can say. I only know the this medium has been a force for good in my life, and trust in some small way it has brought at least some pleasant images into the thought-world of others. And if we each act locally for good, in the end, our impact can be global. Staphylococci of the world UNITE! We have more at stake than our egos or blog rankings!