"Aren't there enough words out there already?" asks one of my non-blogging friends. "Who has the time to read these things anyway?" How I understand that feeling, though as is obvious, I am blogging on despite it.
I am neither someone with a natural affinity to world wide web (I sit in wide-eyed wonderment at the likes of fellow bloggers Jon Bounds or Joanna Geary) nor am I a cypersceptic. I am someone who feels overwhelmed by it.
I would love to meander for hours through this reality which we call "virtual" (yet is as real as what we might call "tactile reality") but I all too easily feel overwhelmed, as though cyberspace is an infinite arena that I have to somehow get a grip on - when life is already tricky enough simply with shopping, cooking, interviewing, writing and working out how to get my son's his nappies dry without the central heating on.
That's why I was very excited to be invited to a conference in Seattle next month entitled No Time to Think: an inquiry into information, technology and quality of life.
It's hosted by David Levy, who is professor at Washington University's School of Information and is about how to deal with the information overload and extreme busyness that result from the new technologies.
For reasons not entirely unrelated to extreme busyness and breast-feeding, I'm unable to go, but I'm very excited to think that even those at the forefront of information and technology are having to deal with the same issues that I am, namely how to use the world wide web to improve our quality of life rather than stress us out.
I am sure it's possible for the internet to be a tool in making life simpler rather than more complicated - but working out how takes effort, time and skill and can't be done from the sidelines. And so I blog on....