Cognitive Resonance

As it’s now 2009, some resolutions would be in order…

• Find a job… easier said than done.
• Replace my mobile phone when the contract expires in March.
• Get to the gym twice a week or more.
• Add more content to this site…

Popularity: 82% [?]

So, I’ve not been updating this anywhere near as much as I should have been or intended to. Oops. I’ll do my best to update it more frequently…

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Hmh. So, I’ve finally decided to start a blog and join the teeming millions of others who’ve had the same idea, only sooner. What can I say, I’ve been slow.

Why have I started a blog? Well, primarily it’ll be somewhere I can keep an online record of interesting snippets of news, ideas, or other assorted detrius I pick up on my trawls of the net. This isn’t intended to be a personal diary, but more a public notepad for things which might come in useful one day.

As such – if anyone is even reading this – don’t expect it to be updated on a daily basis. That’s not to say it won’t be, nor is it to say I won’t post things about my own life or experiences, but don’t expect these things to happen. You never know, they might. Or they might not – a lot depends on whether or not anything strikes me as worth posting, and whether I have time to do so.

Why has it taken me so long to get a blog, when plenty of less tech-savvy people have managed before me? Honestly, I don’t really know. I still need to sort out web hosting for myself, as although I run numerous websites for other people I’ve not got around to creating my own website yet. Part of it has been a case of thinking “oh, well, I can wait for a blog until I’m running it on my own webspace”. Of course, I then realised that I have come across – and subsequently forgotten – many interesting pieces of information – in the time that I’ve been procrastinating. Part of the reason has also got to be my other commitments – I’m going into the final year of a 4-year degree at St Andrews Univeristy, and I don’t have as much free time during the term as I’d like to have to embark on personal projects. During the holidays, especially the summer, I’m far too busy looking for a job (and generally failing).

Finally, a note on the name of this blog. It stems originally from something I came across in one of my courses, the term “cognitive dissonance”. In my field of study it’s generally used when a person (usually though not always a state leader or other “individual” actor in the system) has a pre-existing belief in something which events disprove or question. However, instead of revising their outlook to include this new information they will invent explanations for the conflict between their ideas and what actually happens – which are often completely illogical. Without getting into too much depth or controversy, one could say that certain figures in the US goverment believed so completely that WMD were present in Iraq, that when events failed to prove them right they clung to their original argument, insisting that they’d simply not been found – rather than revising their estimate to include the possibility that they were never there in the first place.

So, that’s cognitive dissonance, and it’s a phrase I like. However when applied to someone’s blog – a collection, after all, of thoughts – it implies a lack of reason or rationality, which is a Bad Thing. By contrast, “resonance” implies the opposite, and very conveniently shares the same word structure. Hence, “Cognitive Resonance” – something which isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, a widely used term and which therefore is different – and which bears some relation to the idea of a blog as a collection of coherent (sometimes) thoughts.

Popularity: 78% [?]