And a small white pillow for my big fat head.

When I was fifteen, my Dad began letting my brother and I take the motorboats out onto the Big Rideau on our own. The Big Rideau is a huge lake on the Rideau canal system, and there are three decent sized towns nestled on nearby shores, within boat range. My brother and I spent a lot of time exploring, and trying to meet other people, who were usually visitors from far away. The Rideau canal system connects the Ottawa river to the St. Lawrence, which leads either to the Great Lakes, or the ocean.

One day, I got the idea that I would try out the traditional communication medium of the desert island castaway. Since I was surrounded by pleasurecraft coming to and fro, if I put a message in a bottle and cast it out into the water, the odds were pretty good that someone would see it, open it, and read it. So I wrote a nice note, describing who I was, what I liked doing, where my cottage was situated, and asking whoever found the note to write me back and do the same. Mindful that in the real world, bottles sink (or damage hulls), I used the most airtight light plastic container I could think of, and sent my messsage off to whoever would find it. Months later, I got a nice note from some girl a couple of years younger than I who lived west of Toronto. I could have established a nice penpal exchange if I were less of a procrastinator, but sadly, I never wrote her back.

I read in the Ottawa Citizen today an article by a Misty Harris entitled, "I blog therefore I am: How technology inflates our egos." (The Citizen charges for access, so I can't link it.) But the title alone gives you the gist of it. She uses an aspect of the Paris Hilton phone incident to try and make a larger point. Harris notes that all of the photographs taken off Hilton's phone are pictures of Hilton herself. She parlays this into the assertion that academics hold that modern technology is turning us all into narcissists.

She quotes one W. Keith Campbell as saying, "When you're with your friends or family, typically your illusions of grandeur are constrained or minimized. But when you have a mechanism like the web, you can be anything. So all those restraints that keep our egos in check are removed."

Now that I should take this on as a topic to challenge, I could ask about myself, "Am I simply being defensive? Are these assertions valid?" After all, I've put an awful lot of myself on the Internet. I once posted incessantly in Usenet. I've blogged myself a decent sized novel in this space here. I've posted upwards of a dozen songs I've recorded at home to a public music site. What does this mean?

I suppose it helps to examine what the ego itself is. It is the self, and your awareness of it as distinct from other things. "Ego" is also used as a kind of measure, our sense of what our relative worth is, but I think that is a superfluous aspect. We all to some extent use our sense of relative worth to ensure our competitive position vis a vis others is where we want it to be - that may be instinctive. But I would submit that the Internet neither adds or takes away from the already present tendency of people to do that.

I truly think this inapplicable to blogs. Harris may assert that, "Similary, weblogs allow individuals to indulge grandiose fantasies of who they are, cataloguing the nuances of their lives - real or imagined - for all to see." To my mind, though, this is a complete red herring. People have always, since the dawn of time, constructed an inner narrative that says something to the effect of, This is the story of my life, this is what has happened to me. Weblogging is simply an additional way of setting that narrative down. I know this weblog is not "for all to see." I wrote it for the first two months with nobody reading it at all. And in all the time since, there have never been more than one or two people reading.

The simple reality is that the noise level is going up. People are not more able to "influence others" now than they have ever been. The voice of one blogger, in general, is no more important today than the voice of one frenchman shouting from the mob at Robespierre on the bascule two hundred and ten years ago.

People are compelled to express themselves. They have felt the need to say something since Cro Magnon began painting ibex and mammoth on the walls of caves in Spain and France, forty thousand years ago. Does this come from ego? Yes - absolutely. We could have nothing to say individually if were not aware of our apartness, our uniqueness. But there could be no common voice, no collective voice, if not for the individual voice. By definition that is so.

Blogging may be narcissism. But it is not by necessity narcissism, any more than we would accuse Dali of narcissim for daring to take a brush to canvas, or Emily Bronte for having the audacity to tell us about Heathcliff and Cathy. And no, I am not comparing blogs to these masterpieces, but simply pointing out that self-expression is valid, and should not be condemned simply for being easier to do than it used to be.

Misty Harris can be excused, I suppose, for thinking that having something to say is the sole purview of newspaper columnists. But my self-expression is no more, and no less a facet of my ego than hers. I want to do it. That does not give me an over-inflated sense of my importance. I am fully aware of (and OK with) how few will read what I write. And that awareness does not lessen my desire to do it. I have many things that I want to say about joy and suffering - but that does not mean I consider anything I say terribly important. I simply feel compelled to say it.