Take Care Not to be A Boiled Frog

WELL, THE RAINS are here again. There are signs of new life in the pond. The water lettuce is starting to sprout and the water lily has several leaves floating already and yesterday, had a flower on it. Today, there are honey bees buzzing and butterflies fluttering around.

It was raining outside when I was reading Christopher Brookmyre’s "Boiling A Frog" yesterday. Tiny froglets from the pond had jumped up onto the patio to stay out of the downpour. They were less than an inch long... and almst transparent. They were just so cute.

Food for thought...

It's been twenty days since I hopped onto the blogging scene。What a wonderful world blogosphere is. You can croak endlessly about anything and everything. And hop from subject to subject, and, unfettered by borders or rules, choose to ignore reason, rhyme or time.

A couple of days ago, I decided to venture out of the bullrushes here. A leap and *sproing* … I landed in a cacophonic community of every conceivable croak of every variation of decibel, pitch and every degree of articulation skill. It's just like a busy street bazaar. Not unlike our noisily delightful pasar malams. Conversations spill endlessly all over the place and there are plenty many choices. Everything is just a hop-skip-jump-click away: trivial and weighty matters, overviews and reviews, rants and raves, observations and nonsensical chatter.

Here, a frog can eat as many flies as it likes while reading every pondering, every lament, every hope, every dream, every despair, every trial and tribulation, every triumph and despair, every drama, obsession and fantasy that arrives in a ping.

Fame or notoriety or maybe even infamy may follow. Maybe one or may be even all three of them are desirable and to be sought after. The medium is the massage. The pleasant warmth of affirmation when your visitor stats spike, and incremental comments in your blog tell you, you are part of hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of people’s daily blog diet.

So now, I know how to get the word out, I can't be silenced anymore. LOL!! :D

Wait a minute.

After this, you might not so fancy finding yourself in other people's stories. With the proliferation of blogs, it's easy to see how so many people get caught up in the movie in their minds.

It's a potential boiling frog scenario.

boiling frog

Losing touch with reality can lead to engaging in a kind of virtual anti-social behavior. This, as Jon Katz points out in Media Rants, is the dark side to the anonymity of on-line conversation. Precisely because people cannot be held accountable for their words, they are much more likely to be verbally abusive. It is far easier to attack someone and question personal motives when the social consequences of face-to-face verbal assaults are removed. The very vitriolic nature of some conversations tend to run counter to equality, and to the highly desirable but sometimes warped notion of freedom of speech. It can intimidate people into a spiral of silence.

We are what we blog. Absolutely.

Take care not to be a boiled frog in your own blog.