Changing life's script

John Mortimer (novelist, retired barrister, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey) has a good line in his new book Where There's a Will about needing a fresh script for life when we get into a rut (this may be a slight misquotation since I picked it up from an extract in a copy of the Daily Mail discovered on the train to yesterday's conference in Oxford... but let's take serendipity seriously). I've been looking for new metaphors for changes technology makes, and maybe this is a good one. Can give you a new part - or write you out. Certainly dumps you with lots of new stuff to learn. Changes the scenery, and some of the cast. Offers you the camera (but not necessarily the audience).

Anyway, the script metaphor seemed to chime in well with Cameron Marlowe's remarks at the conference about the latest personal tool - blogs - appealing to those who embrace a culture of information sharing, and also self. Which prompted me to ponder (as many others have) whether blogs are just a neat tool for the self-publicist, or will evolve into something really useful for more people... and whether multi-author blogs are a different sort of tool. (You can add other authors with the excellent Typepad system that hosts this blog, but it is a bit tedious adding authors one-by-one compared with, say, subscribing people to Yahoogroups). And how do blogs with comments differ from mailing lists or forums with contributions and comments? John Urry had a nice line at the conference about face-to-face conversations providing the opportunity for collaboratively working things out...talking through a topic. Doing that we often jump all over the place, picking up non-verbal cues from the other person as we go - which isn't the same at all in online postings. Maybe in chat and instant messaging...

So does the Net provide a new life script or more encouragement to improvise? Depends on your preference, I guess. We did start talking about personality type (introvert, extrovert)... but that's another story.