Visualizing the creative process is essential in understanding the way our minds and bodies work. Fellini explores this process in 8 1/2, a film about the way Fellini's brain and body work while in the midst of creating, literally, his eighth and a half film (8 features and 1 short). He accomplishes this by using the linear cinematic medium to share non-linear moments of memory, fantasy, and reality. I believe Blogging, as an entity separate from the dynamics, technologies and individuals that comprise the Blogging Community, uses similar non-linear methods to provide us with similar insights into the mind of the creator.

On one level, Blogging helps us to visualize the dissemination and propagation of information. Microdoc News explores this process in their May 20, 2003 piece, Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story. The authors write, 'Microdoc News has been studying the way a story enters the blogosphere, develops, and draws to a conclusion.' One can look at this piece as an exploration of the creative process as manifested by Blogging's neural network.

Visualizing Blogging in this way provides enormous insight into the character and culture of the Blogging Population, much as visualizing Filmmaking (i.e., Fellini's 8 1/2) provides insight into the filmmaker's mind. Microdoc News concludes their report by saying, "blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared."

Our fragmented non-linear approach to information acquisition and production has manifested itself as a framework for storytelling. This distributed storytelling process demonstrates the evolved media customer becoming a media producer, and points to the further decentralization of media and entertainment. And it is within the cultural and technological framework of Blogging that we can clearly see this 'community-directed producing self' emerging from the American character that David Riesman, in his 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, calls the "other-directed self."

This new character is emerging globally. Dan Gillmor investigates this trend with his May 18, 2003 story, A new brand of journalism is taking root in South Korea, where he discusses the success of OhmyNews.com. Gillmor writes, "OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model, where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't, into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic."

This new storytelling character is emerging because stories are an essential building block for the growth and development of culture and tradition. Therefore Blogging can be understood as the process by which culture is forming on the web.