blogging

What do people mean when they talk about things? (Monty Python 1.12)

I‘m often struck by how quickly the buzz goes off news, which seems to me sometimes to bubble up and evaporate away like gossip, with all the afterburn of suffering that this implies, no less intense for its smaller scale. The dreadful actions at the turn of the century, whereby a near-half-team of rugby league players insinuated themselves, in a fashion I call rape, into the sexual company of a young woman who was with two of their team-mates is just one example. This took place in Sockburn, just around the road from where I live and perhaps for this reason is taking a little longer to leave my mind than it might otherwise.

[click to continue…]

{ 36 comments }

Sas marks the first anniversary of her blog this weekend. My hunch is that the first year of any blog is probably quite important in terms of establishing the tone and topics and readership, although of course these things can change over time.

One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading the writing of others in the last year or so is the way in which we are starting to theorise our own work, to think more wholeheartedly and in a more extended way about what is the special character of writing online, of keeping a journal online. Sas writes of it in the post linked above in this fashion:

I am a blogger because I believe it’s a radical thing to take your life and share it. The internets to me, is a metaphor for how we are all connected. So there is a special pleasure in reading your comments. Or in seeing a link back to this blog.

Paul has also commented on this recently, in the context of a discussion on writing online and gender politics.

The blogs I enjoy most are written by people … who have things in common and who enjoy each others’ online company. … I haven’t done the sums, but it seems that a fair proportion of the blogosphere is of this kind. Writers have interests; they share them; others comment. …

My point, such as it is, is that there is a lot more to blogging than fussing and fighting. There are a lot of good writers out there who might otherwise not be published. For the most part, they are not professional writers nor professional politicians. They are not trying to win an argument or to advance themselves professionally. They just write about their interests, for the joy of writing and reading. And they do it rather well.

And of course Giovanni’s entire blog project, beginning here, is embedded in a consideration, or even an interrogation, of what it is we do when we do what we think we do.

[click to continue…]

{ 13 comments }