Quiet Habits

As I'm writing this post, Thanksgiving is one week away. While I think it's great to be thankful throughout the year, I find it's even easier to reflect on what I'm thankful for during this time of year. So I'd like to focus my posts for the next week on things that I'm thankful for and how they've changed my life, the world, or both.

Today, I'm thankful for the miracle of blogging. The fact that I'm even sitting here writing this is a miracle of technology and science. It's the culmination of democracy, years of advancing the technologies of networking, computing, liberal arts, chip design, and much, much more.

My thoughts can be translated into 1's and 0's through a machine capable of billions of computing processes every second, and uploaded through invisible waves, beamed into space and back, to a network of millions of interconnected devices, all so my thoughts can be read and interpreted by other computers and read and pondered by humans around the entire world. It boggles my mind how all of this is possible with little effort from me, but is all held together by hundreds of companies and hundreds of thousands of people working to keep these things running smoothly.

Even several hundred years ago it was nearly impossible to mass produce copies of your writing and if you had the means to do so it was still very difficult and expensive. But today we can write, publish, and aggregate our words across multiple servers, sites, and connection points, all at the push of a virtual button.

The next time you're reading or writing or consuming or creating anything on the Internet, stop for a moment and think of all the pieces that had to come together to make that moment possible. All the scientists, researchers, inventors, laborers, and more who worked together across centuries to make all of this possible. The technologies, the science, the failures that created what is now a global interconnected web that can transport us anywhere in an instant and bring almost any information to a glass screen in our pocket. It truly is a miracle.

And blogging, in my opinion, is one of the most democratic and miraculous mediums to spring from this well of knowledge and technology. The fact that anyone anywhere can write, publish, and distribute their writing to be read by thousands or even millions continues to astonish me. I'm thankful for the opportunity to be just a small drop in the ocean of bloggers and to live in a time where all of this is possible.