The screen illuminates a face while fingers race over the keyboard. Outside, life goes on, the cars honk and a dog hurries past the door. It would appear that once across the threshold of the house the technological life would give way to reality, but at the beginning of this third millennium it is already impossible to delineate the boundary between the virtual world and the other, concrete and physical, that surrounds us. Walking the sidewalks, peering around corners, exchanging words with friends, one always has something of that other component anchored to this universe of pixels and kilobytes.
A blogger is a mongrel creature, standing between two dimensions: the area where she lives and a cyberspace of infinite possibilities for expression and creation. She is a missing link between so many phenomena: journalism and digital writing; Internet experts and the upstarts of the web; protestors with cobblestones in hand and the new civic demands via Facebook or Change.org. The dilemma between living or narrating what happens to us via Twitter; observing or clicking the iPhone's camera; loving or sending an emoticon of a smiley face via cellphone to our partner. The dilemma of behaving as citizens only when when we are in the great World Wide Web, or also doing so in this world of honking horns, passing dogs and bodies that feel.
When we talk of being an internaut in this 21st century, we include in this word the concept of responsibility. The responsibility of assuming a public voice although we are hiding behind a pseudonym. The responsibility of exposing our opinions to the gaze of millions of potential readers. The personal and social cost of so much boldness is felt immediately to a greater or lesser degree.
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