In 1984 I drove to a Storage Technology Corporation warehouse in Boulder, Colorado, to buy my first 300 baud modem. This was back when computer magazines were running ads for the sleek, extruded aluminum boxes the size of a desktop telephone footprint. These 1200 and 2400 baud modems acted as a cute little phone platform allowing your computer to share your phone line.

For five dollars I got a clunky-looking plastic box that was already obsolete. I hooked it up and had my first peek into cyberspace. It was almost spooky watching the letters voluntarily line up across my green CRT. The first site I hit was the Bahai Bulletin Board Service in Boulder. It was run by a Freudian psychotherapist who had a lot of creepy notions about God, and he was sharing them with the world. I felt he needed the perspective of a seminary student.

I enjoyed the Bahai board because the people were nuts and because they talked about things that interested me. All the other local boards I had access to were full of geeks talking about computers.

Those BBSes introduced me to a world of correspondents. I could read a post when I got home from the shop, post a reply before supper and, if it interested someone somewhere in the world, have five answers before bed. Now with the accessibility of the internet it is possible to address anyone in the world who has electricity, a computer and a phone.

In the past you had to know where to access a BBS. Just now while writing this post I Googled “Lebanese blogs” and came up with blog.rrizk.com and could have responded to an on-site adolescent blathering about the meaning of life and war.

A lot of disparaging things have been said about blogs recently, most often by those losing a measure of their control over ideas. Perhaps my favorite condescension was Dan Rather’s, a poor sucker who lied preposterously and fell ignominiously.

But there is a real potential here. We may not realize it, we may not exploit it wisely, but we ought to at least consider it.

In the past if you wanted to reach out and influence someone, you had to run your ideas through several filters. Even if you had a recognizable name and could express yourself compellingly, you still had to find a mss. broker of some sort. You had to get the guidelines of some publication, submit your brainchild in a form they found marketable, and wait for a cabal of judges to decide if anyone should read you. People with an interest in your idea always had the veto.

If you found yourself at the head of an organization of some kind, then of course you could publish any nonsense you wanted to. People believed you because you were in print. Like Al Gore and the environment or Dan Brown and church history, horsefeathers took flight in the world of publishing.

For obvious reasons the blogosphere provides an audience for every nut in the world, and some are already blaming bloggers for the decline in quality propaganda. I just laugh.

But after I laugh, I think. It seems to me that of all the advantages and uses for blogs, you ought to consider a modest three.

1. Blogs represent a humanizing of knowledge, if I can phrase it so grandly. A blog is at least a de-institutionalizing of information. What you say that is true can be believed by another person. What you say that is false can be rejected. You don’t have to be believed or disbelieved because someone read you in a publication they trusted or distrusted. You can say what is true and people will consider what you say; it needn’t be the revised or truncated version your editor chose to print or broadcast. In case you doubt me, watch the reactions of people when you tell them a fact you heard on Rush Limbaugh or CNN, depending on your audience.

I think your minds ought to toy with the ramifications of this change. If one word of truth outweighs the world, I suspect the center of gravity has shifted, even if negligibly.

2. Blogging is an opportunity to think. As one of my favorite writers said, “language is the technology of thought”. I further believe thinking and writing are not coincidental acts, they are the same act. To blog is to think in public, sometimes in a more gratifying way because you have readers, sometimes in a more embarrassing way because you have contradictors. But I believe thinking is important enough to risk it.

Blogging might not make you a great thinker, but then reading the Bible won’t make you a great Christian either. Both are a move in the right direction.

3. Posting regularly to a blog changes how you live. Everything you see, you now see as grist. Even if for only the duration of the red light, you reflect to some degree on the value of what you just heard on the radio. Is it true, is it meaningful, is it significant, does it justify my ventilation of it? It is the start of a life of reflection.

It’s not that many of us didn’t already do this, but I suggest that what we did between our ears should not have made its way into publication. We might never have found out how much pure junk was rattling around up there because we never sorted through it properly.

Blogging is not the remedy for all our corrupt institutions, obviously. We got rid of Dan Rather but there are still thousands more. I don’t mean to make this thing bigger than it is. But neither do I want us to suppose that it is less than it might be.

If the human experience is what we believe it is, it could often be a matter of understanding life and war.