url, interrupted

It's been nearly a week now that I've had access problems with blogger. Most blogs have been taking minutes at a time to load, and a maddeningly high proportion of attempts have ended with error messages. Or the browser has just frozen, while "reading" or "waiting for reply", or "on vacation in Siberian Ice Chamber" or something like that.

Even more infuriating has been the fact that I haven't been able to access my own blog to upload stuff. Not even text. The other evening I had this nice idea with a few slanted photos. Two hours of my life later, all I had was the knowledge that this page was empty. Then there have been a couple of ideas for music posts -- one which I promised last time with the hold your hand in mine, and another one that suggested itself to me at a website today. The first can't exist without the music, and the second would be greatly improved with it. Neither worked, because odeo went walkabye on me. (I'm so mad I won't even link to them right now.) And it's not for want of trying -- what a waste of time.

Anyway, it's kind of tautological when I put it this way, but it's funny how blogging increases one's dependence on the internet. I've been getting my news online for a while now anyway, but this is about more than that. It's about entertainment. These last few days have signaled to me that not being able to post when and what I want to post matters to me. And the fact that I wasn't able to post makes me think about it all the more.

I'll tell you why that too is not that interesting, really, if you look at it in context. The last few days I've been reading up on some background material for a paper I'm working on. One of the topics touched upon is rumination -- conscious thoughts that revolve around a common theme and recur despite the absence of any relevant environmental cues. Most models of rumination agree that these recurrent thoughts happen due to some discrepancy between the way the world is and the way we want it to be. Generally, progress towards a given goal generates positive feelings, while absence of progress, or even slowing down, generates negative feelings. And where there's a discrepancy it's possibly being either reduced or increased. All of which, put together, means that when you're not where you want to be and you're sitting on your behind not being able to do anything about it there's a decent chance you're thinking doleful thoughts about it.

It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom, though. Rumination is "adaptive", which means to say it has some positive consequences. One way of thinking about it is that one must have a way of knowing which of ones goals are currently unsatiated, and our minds keep thoughts associated with these unsatisfied goals activated rather than stashed away off the backest burner. The first evidence of this interesting effect came from the Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927. The story goes that it occurred to her while observing waiters at a restaurant -- they only seemed to remember orders they took while the order was in process, forgetting them as soon as they were delivered. Experimentally, she got people to carry out simple tasks such as counting beads and listing cities, and then interrupted them at various points. She found that when asked to recall these tasks at a later point, people remembered more of the interrupted tasks than the completed ones. Other researchers have over the years zeroed in on this phenomenon over the intervening years -- today, this we know from nothing. The point is that ruminative thoughts keep us alert to our unsatisfied goals, thereby increasing the chances that we attend to them at some point.

Of course, it's not that we need reminding of some of our unsatisfied goals. Many of us could do just fine without the extra stimulus. And that's why we try to distract ourselves, with opiates such as television and alcohol, especially when major goals remain uncompleted and impending failure looms large -- be it in the near future or the past, however distant. I guess that's what is irritating me the most about this stupid blogger block. It started as an idle distraction, soon graduating to the rank of mild opiate. It's fun. I like posting. It helps take my mind off work, so I could even argue there's a medical benefit (it keeps me sane...)

But why in bleeding misery will it not let me upload?