# Posted 12:52 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

OXBLOG -- INTROSPECTION AND HISTORY: What began as a response to my critics became an unexpected exploration of my intellectual development over the past five months.

While compiling material for yesterday's posts on the occupation of Iraq, I became more aware than ever of how blogging enhances one's self-awareness and forces one to take responsibility for one's thoughts and actions.

For dedicated historians of the self, it has always been possible to gather together journal entries, personal correspondence and other documents in order to assemble an intellectual self-portrait. However, thanks to blogging, the investment of time and effort necessary to become aware of one's own political development has fallen to the point where it has actually become an inviting prospect.

In our heads, we tend to keep an informal score of our own rights and wrongs on the issues of the day. Unsurprisingly, such informal scores tend to ignore losses and emphasize wins, thus suggesting to ourselves that we have far more insight and credibility than we actually do.

At the same time, such informal scores tend to reduce the value of actual wins, since all one can to say to one's opponents long afterward is "I'm usually right and you're usually wrong." And they can say the same thing right back. Or just make fun of you for your groundless self-confidence.

However, in the blogosphere, one must hand over to the reading public the right to measure the worth of your latest post against the value of your older ones. If a blogger is not consistent in his or her views, the reading public (especially other bloggers) will impose consistency from without.

Even professional journalists rarely have to endure this sort of scrutiny. While a record of their work is available in every public library, who actually spends their spare time burrowing through stacks of old newspapers? (Nexis-Lexis is beginning to change all that, but subscriptions are not yet priced for the general public.)

In the process of compiling material for yesterday's posts on Iraq, I found it disturbing to read hundreds of paragraphs that I myself had written but whose contents I would not have recognized in the absence of a byline. Thus, to take either the credit or the blame for the contents of those paragraphs seems rather strange.

At the same time, there were discernible patterns of thought that gave a distinct personality to what I had written. On the other hand, I would not have recognized such patterns if not for the convenience of the OxBlog archive.

In my next post, I will finish off the project that I began yesterday. Yes, it is a response to my critics. But much more importantly, it is a process of learning about myself. And it enables me to recognize that which is so distinctive about belonging to a community of individuals -- a.k.a. the blogosphere -- that has made a similar commitment, more or less formal, to learning about themselves.

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