blogging a connection

I've been reading -- and very occasionally writing for -- The Globe and Mail for more than three decades. I remain a loyal reader.

Recently, however, I have been confused and disappointed by columns that appear each Saturday in the Style section. Three terrifically talented writers -- Heather Mallick, Leah McLaren and Karen von Hahn -- write crushingly mundane columns about crushingly mundane things. Lawn sprinklers. Making jam in your slippers. Back-to-school time. This is THE GLOBE AND MAIL. Shouldn't this full page of ink be spent on something that's actually going to enlighten or educate me? I scan these columns weekly -- some perverse need to irritate myself, no doubt -- so I know that Leah McLaren's guilty pleasure is hating celebrities. I know that Karen von Hahn likes cinnamon rolls. I know that Heather Mallick bought a dinner ring.

I always ask: so what? who cares?

Now, if these people were my friends -- and after this, I'm sure they never will be -- I'd care about the minutia of their lives. Beyond Thanksgiving dinner and someone to hold your hand on your deathbed, that's what relationships with close friends and families comprise: you found the perfect yarn for your next sweater project, the damned garage overcharged me for the oil change, baby Susie's kindergarten teacher is a storm trooper.

Then it came clear. These aren't newspaper columns. These are blog entries.

Here's how I worked it out. After peep-peep-peeping about these columns to a much-younger friend, he responds: "But it's interesting to see how other people live their lives. What they think. How they do things."

Oh. Ahh. My brain makes the connection. What else could explain the popularity -- the hollering, arm-waving explosion, to be more accurate -- of blogs? This explains 40,000 new blogs a day. This explains millions of people reading the daily do-ings of people they don't know. This includes you.

Think of the 1909 E. M. Forster story "The Machine Stops", about a world where "individuals live in isolation in a standard 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine". In that world, people never meet in person.

When I was a child, naturally curious to see the differences between my family and others, to learn about how other people do things, I had only to look. My days were full of extended family. My grandmother lived in the house next door. My aunt lived in the house on the other side. My grandmother's two sisters and their sprawling families lived around the corner in two adjacent houses. I was in friends' homes on a daily basis and even our teachers invited us around to help wash the windows or have an end-of-term party. These relationships, sustained by an understanding of the minutia of each others' lives, thrive to this day.

I don't have to read the personal diaries of strangers to feel connected to the human race.

Others -- younger others -- are not so fortunate. My friend sees his family a handful of times a year. He probably doesn't know his grandmother's sister's son's wife's mother, as I know mine.

Life is quite different for those who came after the baby boom, including my own daughter. For whatever reason -- and I must be one of those who is to blame -- they didn't grow up physically and emotionally tethered to friends and families by the hundreds of interconnecting threads that are woven when you live in day-to-day contact.

I cannot substantiate it, but my observations tell me that relationships between families and friends are very different now. That modern urban life pushes us apart rather than drawing us together. My mother talked to her mother every day. And they both talked to all of their siblings. And somebody called Zia Rosalie -- not really an aunt but an old lady who lived down the block -- to see what she was having for supper and let the others know. Who had time for blogs?

Email, the Web and, now, blogs, are celebrated because they have made human connection easier. But the question is begged. Did these new technologies become ubiquitous because they enhance human connection or were we forced to invent them because, somehow, we lost those connections and are trying to find our way back?

My sister and I are 1,000 miles apart, but we talk a couple of times every week and I know if her shoes pinch. I know which pair of shoes pinch. My best friend and I have lived in different cities for nearly 40 years, but a month has never gone by without a letter, a phone call or a visit. Now, we exchange emails about crushingly mundane things, including lawn sprinklers and jam, all of which mean a great deal to me.