Every so often there are mini-waves among the blogs I read about the blogs I read. Ian writes about how lucky he is to be able to write whatever he feels like writing. Ben notes some voluminous bloggers including me - volume being one of my claims to fame in any number of areas of life. Rob has written a massive post on his hopes for blogs, community and reformation.
I am surprised everyday that I post, find a topic to post about and most of all I earn the comments of readers - which is the real post of blogging after the stats ritual every morning. Entering my 24th month of this place, I would note that there are things I do not write much about: family, work, TV, me. This is odd as 95% of my waking hours are filled with family, work, TV and my private inner life. I also do not write about my hopes for a better world or how this or that might be changed. I suppose that is because I am fairly happy with family, work and me and TV does not bug me that much. If I were to tell you something about me and TV, I'd have to say that I watched the conclusion of The Bachalorette and I do not feel too good about that, even though it was for the same reason a lot of people watch NASCAR - witnessing that moment when someone is spinning in the air uncontrollably, unable to reckon when and how they are going to fall other than knowing it is going to happen...in...seconds.
Of greater interest to me would be why people read this blog or any blogs. Writers of blogs often have belief that they are part of great change or mini-Dickensian chronoclers of the era. I am still big on the media little more than as a simple diagnostic tool for mild hypomania. And a source to find the best jelly donuts in towns you are about to visit.
If I have any grand conclusion after this time, it is the great dissappointment with blogging - the self-congratulatory and insular rather than inclusive beast that it is. If there were the slightest co-ordination, multiple views on major events could be tracked live or ideas could be collectively developed in the way that open-source software is developed. Rather than that we are subject to the univoiced parrotting of the same story over and over, scab-picking one statement of no real value by a news host or producer until they lose their job with no similar treatment of politicians or, more importantly, policy. I suspect more and more we will learn that the political bloggers have less and less of the integrity they insist in others and we will be left with yet another moment of wondering how we could all have been so stupid. If you are old enough you may remember when TV was supposed to be a great educator. I feel the same way about most blogging most days, finding the bad legal advice on copyright for all at Boing Boing, for example, to be just about as important as how The Bachalorette panned out in the end. Dreamy.
And yet I still type and surf...especially on a sick day with a sick kid in the house and a spouse on jury duty.
Comments
Marian Evans - March 1, 2005 1:50 PM
Okay. You've convinced me. Blogs suck. Now what?
Alan - March 1, 2005 2:21 PM
Jams and jellies.
Cyn - March 1, 2005 2:56 PM
So, does this mean you are part of something you want no part of?
Alan - March 1, 2005 4:35 PM
Are you telling me you don't like jelly donuts?!?!
Arthur - March 1, 2005 8:37 PM
to be just about as important as how The Bachalorette panned out in the end. Dreamy.
Heh. I think I know what you mean.
Alan - March 1, 2005 8:42 PM
You watched too?
Arthur - March 1, 2005 9:33 PM
You watched too?
I pertinently deny everything and nothing.
Alan - March 1, 2005 9:53 PM
Don't you think that John Paul guy from <i>The Bachalorette</i> looked like a young Gene Simons from KISS? I think she knew. I think she was scared.<p><center><img src="images/2005/simmons1.JPG" vspace="20"></center>
Arthur - March 1, 2005 10:09 PM
like a young Gene Simons from KISS? I think she knew. I think she was scared.
I think so too. That doesn't mean that I've seen the show though.
Alan - March 1, 2005 10:16 PM
...but it doesn't mean you didn't either...
Arthur - March 1, 2005 10:47 PM
...but it doesn't mean you didn't either...
Yes. Um. No. Uh. YO.
What does the honourable GenX40 think of those two (1, 2) different immigration cases that made the headlines the last couple of days?
I thought those were fascinating, particularly from a legal point of view... but I'm not an Immigration expert...
Alan - March 1, 2005 11:18 PM
#2 is great news. Inciter of this sort of rubbish. Send them all back. #1 is great as well- we need good folks like this good lady. We took in hundreds of Bosnian and Kosovar war - we should trade all the #2s for #1s. You might guess I am not too concerned with the legalities in these case.
Ben (not Wright) - March 2, 2005 4:22 AM
About blogs -- I think they help to provide extra perspective on things. Now, as for those who show themselves to be without integrity: they will lose credibility.
But, come on! It's still just people writing these things. They're no better or worse than the writers themselves--just much easier to update, edit, and correct.
Alan - March 2, 2005 8:27 AM
That is true, Ben, and a good way to look at it. But look at this bizzare thread where what can only be "new economy" 1997 thinking rearing its ugly head post-boom bust and attaching itself to blogs and thought. The idea that the "old rules" don't apply and that blogs are reinventing a new precious order that can only be appreciated by a few and gleaned only from certified programming nerds is the same crap that venture capitalists thought in the dot com rush to waste. This idea underlies <i>Boing Boing</i>'s clap trap about copyright as well.<p>The funny thing about it all is that the only way you can rise to the top in the new order is to have less eduaction and experience, supported only by the solitude of professional coding - a new Masonic order. I have been thinking that there is something about coding in itself that is the source of these infectious thoughts - the perception that perfection creates functional beautiful presentation, the disassociation from the creation of the coder from the actual goal of the client. The resulting confidence <i>and</i> insularity is quite a marvel and even a hazard. Snakeoil salesmen who actually trust what's in the bottle.
Marian Evans - March 2, 2005 8:27 AM
Ben, good point. But some of them must be better than the people who write them. My husband's blog is surely better than he is, for example. What? Just doing research dear! Ooops gotta go.
Alan - March 2, 2005 8:13 PM
Here is another interesting example of a blog that is not so independent as it would appear at first.