musings: nature and name games

Reading Hannah's blog, I was most struck by the contrast between nature and technology.  She was exploring many exotic places and doing lots of interesting outdoors activities, like climbing sand dunes and volcanoes.  In general, she was very actively involved with the world around her.  However, she was sharing her experiences online.  I think this blog exemplifies anything that is good about the internet, and that it does not have to isolate you from interacting with the outside world and the people in it.  Also, the use of pictures was excellent.

I'd like to add that my opinion is that blogs are a medium, not a genre.  Hannah's blog works as a fairly traditional travel log and could probably exist in an offline format.  The internet blog is just the medium she uses to share her experiences with the world.

My questions for Hannah would be: do you agree with the above statement or not?  And how involved are you with the internet?  You seem adventurous, not like you sit at a computer all day, yet you've made such a functional and well-organized blog.  How do you feel about the internet in general, and do you think you've found a healthy balance?

Reading Anne's blog...the mention of the introduction game she played in a class really stood out to me, since we do a lot of silly name games in our class.

"Here, for example, is one of our early exercises. On the first morning of class, we knew very little about one another (only what we had talked about at breakfast), but were told to draw on that very slim ¨data¨ to make some ¨observations¨ about what we thought one another was like. We were actually given a suitcase full of old magazines (like National Geographics) and asked to tear out three pictures that we thought we expressive of one another."

Could we do something like that?  It seems far more interesting than picnics and general shared traits!