My thoughts about the conference are still forming …

The sheer magnitude of the data is staggering. As I write this, I am on a jet flying from my father’s house on Long Island to my home in Washington D.C., working on my laptop and listening to the Rachimaninov Vespers through a headset. If I were to take a snapshot of this moment, it would show a blue computer screen filled with words, a gray keyboard resting on a beige tray top against a background of green seat upholstery, and a back window with flickering lights in the distance. If I transferred that simple picture to my computer as a digital image, it could easily consume about 100,000 bytes of information. Were I to simulaneously record one second of the Vespers as an audio file on my computer, it could occupy about 250,000 bytes of information. Now suppose I made a snapshot and audio recording ten times a second for the entire sixty-minute flight. By the time I touched down, I would have accumulated more than 10,000,000,000 bytes of information. Without a compression program, the hard drive on my laptop would overflow before we even reached Delaware.

Now imagine that I tried to record all the thoughts that passed through my mind during the flight: the unfamiliar stab of anxiety as we took off, the bewildered grief as we passed by the gaping hole at Ground Zero in the skyline of Manhattan, and then the nagging question of where I parked the car when I left Washington Friday evening. How many bytes would be required to record all these memories remembered, all these feelings felt? Certainly as many as were needed for the physically sensed sights and sounds.

Now multiply these numbers by all the seconds of a lifetime, and the amount of data managed by the mind becomes truly staggering. It would seem more than any supercomputer could handle.

- Dean Hamer, The God Gene

I think, in its most modern application, this is really what Jacques Derrida was saying when he spoke of deconstruction. There is an amazing amount of sensation and reflection we experience every single day. Far more than our brains could ever efficiently process. And so our brain kindly dumps about 95% of it so we don’t get overwhelmed. (that 5%, however, still overwhelms me) Then, on top of that, when we tell stories or write blog posts or novels or biographies; we continue to cut more and more out. And what we mostly cut out, whether consciously or otherwise, are those parts which don’t favor us or which don’t fit our preconceived notions of how the world works and how we appear to others.

Derrida wanted us to be aware of the extent of our selectivity and the gross misrepresentation of reality it portrays. Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting describes history as a thin thread of yarn stretched over a vast ocean of the forgotten. The concept has stuck with me over the past few years and with everything I read I try to intently focus on what is unsaid just as much as what is said. It’s a difficult exercise though and mostly I fail.

Which I was reminded of yet again this weekend at the Internet and Society Conference at Harvard University. Most of the participants and hosts of the conference were the aristicrocy of the blogosphere. Those individuals often referred to as the Alpha-Bloggers: Dave Winer, Joi Ito, Rebecca MacKinnon, Alex Steffen, Ethan Zuckerman, Susan Crawford, Hoder, Dan Gilmore, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, David Weinberger et. al. If you spend a good deal reading around the blogosphere, it’s impossible not to read these blogs – everyone and their mother’s mother links to whatever falls out of their mouth. Sometimes it feels like 50% of the conversation in the blogosphere revolves around what these 15 to 20 bloggers are saying. So I came into the conference thinking I already had a good idea of what these people are like, not only as bloggers, but as individuals.

I was dead wrong.

Most of us probably look at our blogs as a reflection of who we are. I know I do. In fact, I often think to myself that those who have read this blog for a good while probably know me better than many of my friends I see every day because I’m so much more willing to "get deep" on here than I am at any bar or party with friends. But the truth is, our blogs are just the smallest sliver of who we really are and what we really experience. Maybe it’s another side of us, but it’s nowhere close to all of us.

So I guess what I’m saying is reading blogs is cool. It’s a great way to hear perspectives you normally wouldn’t and from voices far away. But when it comes to really understanding someone, I don’t think there’s any replacement for actually meeting them face to face. It was very cool to meet Liza this past weekend. I wish I had been able to meet Elena in D.C. I look forward meeting Xolo in January. And for all of you in the area, we’re having a San Diego Bloggers meetup this coming Saturday. Please come and spread the word.