Blogs provide a relaxed and easy forum to open one's mind, exercise one's communications muscles, enter the world. As with letterwriting and journalkeeping you can express yourself at your own pace in your own voice--with the potential that someone, a friend, a rival, a complete stranger, may applaud your efforts, elaborate on your arguments, or assail your every word. Like James Thurber, the blogger is saying this is my world and welcome to it.
Wikis provide many of the pleasures of blogging with the added dimension of a community project. Yours can be a voice among many, presumably with one uniting goal. It's a perfect medium for collaborative research, brainstorming, a piecemeal process of cumulation with a built-in mechanism for correction and amplification.
As Internet phenomena, blogs and wikis are subject to the whims of an unpredictable public. I don't like it that cranks can monopolize and pervert a discussion, almost with impunity. There is the temptation to make the Internet one's only world and to lose appreciation for human contact; even email seems quaint and feeble compared with the power of blogs and wikis.
Blogs and wikis offer tremendous potential for MACPA, in terms of interaction with and between members. Time and distance present such obstacles to a vibrant and involved community and blogs can close those gaps. Better than any survey, we could obtain perspectives on an issue or program with qualitative detail. Especially as younger generations of CPAs become the majority of our members, blogs, wikis and other Internet tools should become instruments for keeping continually in touch without becoming intrusive.
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