I love cycles. They're so...cyclical.

Maybe we talked about this in class? It's entirely possible, so if I'm jacking somebody's thought, slap me on the knuckles and I'll be glad to give credit where credit's due. This just struck me tonight, passing over something in this week's reading.

Blogging is a new oral tradition--perhaps the only kind of oral tradition a people bred to be so isolatory in nature can truly maintain. We've already established that in the 2006 here-and-now cyberspace is one of the few only spaces in which humans really share and interact. I for one cannot picture a gathering in Central Park 'round a campfire for the sole purpose of people telling stories. Psh. Kum-by-freaking-yah. So instead we've got the new greenspace: we've got the internet. We've got blogs.

So picture this: we members of the new frontier sit around our campfire out there in Deadwood. We roast our weenies, we make s'mores, we drink and we talk. We make fun of one another and we make eyes at one another, and we tell truths and lies and stories, yes? They start out as anecdotes; some are immediately forgotten and some are pleasant to mull for a short period of time, but some? Some stories, some tellers, get remembered. If the weaver of the web is good at his craft he draws a crowd--the same listeners come back for more, perhaps bringing new ears, eyes, minds with them, instating the storyteller with cred and lending him a type of tribal power. If the yarn he spins is as good a tale as he is a storyteller, perhaps even after he's stopped telling that story and moved on to something else, or maybe stopped telling stories altogether, the legend he told continues to be diffused through time and space.

Still there? Ach. You're so sweet.

'kay. So.

In a similar--(though not analogous) --fashion, bloggers sit around and tell one another stories. Some of the really fine tale-tellers get a following or get syndicated, or just become really really cool. Some of those really good stories become cult items. Great posts (cyber-tales?) may be linked, replicated, and the original stories retold. Snippets of the original story relayed by Legend Master #1 might be used to supplement another blogger's fresh story. Thus, the yarn that that one man once spun is hyperlinked, alluded to, or semi-consciously accessed by another blogger... and another... and another, helping to architect the collective conscious of those in the new frontier.

Maybe we ain't got lips out hurr in Deadwood to employ in relatin these stories (okay, so not ones that get heard or seen minus video), but what we do have are fingers and what we can do is link and retype, passint those "legends" down and across in our new communal space, in new reorganized (and perhaps waaaay more far-reaching) tribes.

I promise I'm going to actually write on topic next and bring my whimsy up short of taking me wherever it wills.