I'm still waiting for the nationwide Cigarette Aesthetics Blog, though.

Helen, as usual, has the right idea.

Not with the smoking per se, of course--though I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's a wide spectrum of cigarette activity between abstinence and addiction that we ignore the more we automatically label smoking "a disgusting habit," and to our aesthetic peril.

But with the discipline of the conceit: limiting the scope of each post to that which can be encompassed by the smoke from a single cigarette.

Without such discipline, of course, blogging is every bit as debilitating an addiction as smoking. Believe me--I grew up in a generation (and social circle) where most of my friends had LiveJournals, and when we were ushered into a room around a microphone and asked to spill our guts about them for the newspaper the only thing that seemed odd to me was that there were other people around. I'm not saying the Internet made me confessional. But the medium of the blog normalizes a confessional behavior that is both infinitely performative (anyone could stumble upon the URL!) and solitary (there's no one to look in the eyes). And everything, everything, everything becomes potential post fodder.

Because on the Internet, every thought must be inscribed to be transmitted. Permanence is a byproduct of the medium. And when there's very little distinction between the action required to type out an IM and the action required to type out a blog post, publication becomes the obvious answer.

So it's not just that my generation is going to have problems with this "face-to-face-communication" you speak of. It's that we don't have an internal mechanism to distinguish between "thought worth sharing" and "thought not worth sharing." We assume that the virtual marketplace of ideas is robust enough that the cream will rise to the top of the Google search page, and beyond that we let our fingers do all the thinking.