Meta

A few years ago (and by a few, I mean "probably close to ten") I took a few univeristy psych courses. I wasn't pursuing a degree, or anything, it was just something that interested me.

One of the things we learned about was what was called "Meta-Perspectives."

A meta-perspective is "my perspective of you."

Of course, that's a first generation meta-perspective. It can go a lot further than than. You can have "Your perspective of my perspective of you," and "My perspective of your perspective of my perspective of you." And on and on until your brain explodes.

Well, I had an online experience recently that reminded me of meta-perspectives. Lemme tell you about it.

I used to have a web site. I still do, actually -- it's at http://caughtinthenet.org. Don't go there, there's no point; it's just a far, far less attractive version of this blog.

Anyway, back when I had a legit web site, I kept and archive of my newspaper columns there, so that wierd, obsessive folks could and read the whole run of the column, all the way back to when I couldn't write myself out of a paperbag. It was kind of cool, I must admit, but as time went on, and I became less and less inclined to update the site, I found myself thinking, "Who the fuck cares?" and just, pretty much, threw in the towel. There really wasn't any need on the Internet for an archive of borderline-boring Internet columns, so why bother?

So, while checking out my statcounter logs the other day, I came across an instance of someone hitting this blog from the Williams Lake Tribune site, which made me a little curious.

The Williams Lake Tribune, for those who happen to have gotten here without having any knowledge of it, publishes my weekly Internet column, and has for a good number of years.

Anyway, I followed the link from my referral log back to the Tribune site, to see how people had gotten to my blog from there, and to my surprise, I discovered my column available at their website.

Which was cool. But also weird. Because I always kind of felt like, if my columns were going to be available online, I'd be the one making them available.

And besides, their version of my column was badly formatted -- there were no column breaks, which turns the whole thing into a long, mushy, rambling, ugly mass of text.

Though the links are clickable, which is pretty cool.

The point is, seeing my column on their site was just a bit like their perspective of me. And only discovering the fact that my columns were on their site was because someone visisted me through that site, and I found that visit through my statcounter log...well, that's just one more perspective.

It's all very weird, but in a good way.

Now I have to go before my brain explodes.