Zen and the art of weblogging…
MUS Press: Heather Hamilton gets fired from her job for lampooning work mates and corporate protocol on her wonderfully sardonic website and men in black promptly set The Atomic Bomb Clock forward to 7 minutes to midnight. Which reminds me of the Iron Maiden song, “Two Minutes To Midnight”, which kicks ass and makes me want to expedite the apocalypse, or whup-ass on Satan, or beat on my boss…Stuff dooce would have done whilst employed.
So what is this tragi-comic world of weblogging? I must admit I am overly
conscious of the movement now, having enlisted myself into the ranks of
the self-publicizing masses, for the benefit and amusement of me, myself and
I, and perhaps no one else. That’s the beauty of it. Take it or leave it.
Window shopping with the option to sample, or even eat a full course meal.
Staring as long as your short attention span remains dialated and drooling,
then, clickety click off to another salacious portal. Hone the appetite for distraction. And the weblogger is the purveyor of such inane diversion. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to feed them candy…
But wait! Steal this webpage kids! Anarchy is not just for dummies anymore…
And that’s just it…it’s the old DIY thing, stretched to its laziest perhaps, but most effective. Face it, we’re not all artists or authors. But anyone can rant on a blog. And that’s cool. Generally I want to avoid self-referencing-to-death discussions on this site, but lately the phenomena of weblogging has taken me by storm and others too, like this
kottke and fans thread, who obviously have too much time on their hands that they contemplate weblogging. (Note how I casually affiliate myself with
kottke…advanced weblogging techniques) Some take the high road that
weblogging is a new form of journalism or artistic mode of expression. And
the more abstruse the theory the merrier for all I’m concerned, lets get all these half-baked ideas cooking under a virtual, never sleeping sun. Perfect medium for conspiracy theory and pseudo-science, alternative news and self-promotion. All wonderful past-times. A chalkboard for amatuers, lunatics and professionals alike. Finally, a public place without barriers for all to share.
Blogs as journalism, blogs as poetry, blogs as deviation, blogs as
catharsis, blogs as dialectic. Blogs as comedy. The more words, argument
and perspective in the universe the greater. And that’s the general equation. Because after all, in the future we’ll be romancing one another through our personal websites…in between visits into the Orgasmatron that is…And just think about all discouraged writer/slacker types that had no outlet up until now except their little forlorn coffee stained notebooks and bitten fingernails? Previously they had to print their stuff, or bind their books by hand, or carve them into stone tablets, and then mercilessly inflict them upon friends and family.
Now they publish all sorts of pointless crap and commentary to the web.
So what’s a blog? What’s the point?
Something that others don’t know about, or think about during normal states of consciousness or pursue for lack of time, resources, and sanity. Hence the hyperlinked culture of short attention spans, headline news, snippet chunklet-oddity philosophy. The world is Vast. Cover it all in time elapsed segments and weave a more meaningful thread of pattern that you wish to elucidate. A blog is a personal order of sorts, be it a personal spin or a personal selection of what’s important out there, what’s salient. It’s a reflection of the author, a representation of the self. Essentially that means that some will hide behind the anonymity, others will use it wisely, still others will make pure mockery and madness of it all.