On Blogging: An Introduction

TOPIC
My friend and co-worker John says that I should blog.

ANECDOTE
Let me tell you a story. Long ago (around 1995), when I was in high school, I showed up for that year’s picture day wearing a flannel button-down shirt open over a t-shirt. Not unusual, given the time period, except that, as far as I can recall, that was the first time I had worn that particular sartorial combination, and the grunge moment was already on the wane (oddly enough, my father had a similar experience with a nehru jacket).

RELEVANT? GERMANE?
It goes without saying that I’ve come late to the blogging phenomenon, and were I a person of less scrupulous (Diogenean, even) honesty, I’d say that it was because I thought that I wanted to let the medium mature before I decided to give it a go as a means of expressing myself. In reality, I just couldn’t see why a regular series of ramblings on what I had for breakfast would be that terribly interesting to people. After all, I’ve only ever found one person who wasn’t my mother who had any interest in what I have for breakfast.
All told, it looked to me like the personal web pages that you got in the early days of the web’s popularity, when AOL or Tripod or Geocities would allow people to put up a site proclaiming their passionate love of hamsters or Forever Knight through the poignant medium of the animated GIF, seemingly just for the purpose of giving people a bullhorn to shout “I’M HERE!” from the metaphorical rooftops of the Internet.

What my analysis failed to take into account was this: People love to shout “I’M HERE!” from the rooftops. Even if no one’s listening.

DIGRESSION: COLLECTIVE REALITIES
Of course, if you shout loudly enough for long enough, eventually someone’s going to start listening. In the real world, it’s generally your neighbors, closely followed by the police. On the Internet, however, with no police to call or virtual shotguns to discharge, people are reduced to talking to someone they want to engage (even if only to tell them to shut up). It’s as if the police and neighbors took to shouting back from their own rooftops until the whole neighborhood was a sort of conversational anthill in which topics spiraled around one another, and occasionally, by virtue of the law of averages (in combination with some sort of pseudo-Jungian hive mind), made some progress.

That progress has led us to the Internet as it is today, where social networking sites, wiki-this and wiki-that, and the blogsphere (to name only the examples that most readily come to mind) link users in a sort of post-modern, self-referential game of Six Degrees of Separation. Everyone knows what everyone else is saying (and what they’re saying about what they’re saying), and it forms the new basis of our common experience, the way that religion and the TV news used to. It’s reality by worldwide committee, and eventually, we may get to find out if people in large enough groups can actually be smarter than as individuals.

My hopes aren’t high, but we’ll see.

THE POINT
All that having been said, here I am. I’ve got my own personal bullhorn, so let’s see if anyone will listen. Or, frankly, if I’ve got the attention span to keep this up for more than two weeks. This isn’t going to be about anything per se, but rather a smattering of whatever I’m thinking about at the time. There’ll be some rants, some tech geekery, some general observations, some notes on living in Boston, and the occasional manifesto (like this one, but better). In general, I’ll be reversing Harold Ross’s dictum: If I can’t be interesting, I’ll try to be funny.

Sorry I’m late to the party. Is there any gin left?