Blog

Kevin of Bastish.net commented the other night on my recent post about the Yomiuri Shinbun article on blogging in Japan, and in doing so, brought up an important aspect about blogging and how “mainstream” it really is. In my excitement in coming across the article, I made the mistake of losing perspective. Kevin was right to call me on my use of “rudimentary” to describe the article, which came across as a perjorative. Re-reading my post, I’m not a little embarrassed at its boosterism, and its on-high tone.

I think the key word is context. As Kevin wrote,

It’s easy to think that blogging is taking the US by storm if you are a techy guy. I always get that impression. Especially when I compare it to Japan, but the fact is, not even ONE of my friends back home (or in Japan) knows what a “blog” is. They skip over those articles or just don’t care. It really does still seem like a play thing for geeks, internet savvy journalists, and Internet savvy writers.

Within “our” little circle of bloggers (and I hope you feel as uncomfortable with that “our” as I do in writing it), of course blogging takes on an inflated importance, and at this point, the concept of keeping a public diary or journal is probably second nature to those of us who do it. But the reality is that most folks, including those close to us, have no idea what it is, or what it is exactly that we spend so much time (speaking for myself) working on.

This was brought home to me about a month ago at a party I attended. My connection to the host was that we had met through our blogs. But as either of us tried to explain to others at the party (both Japanese and non-Japanese), “Oh, we have blogs, and that’s how we met,” “blog” might as well have been a spaceship for all these other folks knew.

Unfortunately, I have found myself throwing around the term “blog,” both in public and online, like it’s common parlance. But common to whom? Like Kevin, I would venture that most of my friends (and indeed, all of my family) have no idea what a “blog” is, and probably have only the most abstract of concepts if I say “online diary or journal”. Part of the problem is the word “blog” itself, which frankly is aurally unpleasant. When I hear or say that word, my mind conjures up an image of something in between “blob” and “blah, ” that is to say, something heavy, unmoving, and oozing words that for 99.9% of the populace, are nothing more than tired, run-on ramblings. “Blog” (and its correlatives like “blogging,” “blogger,” “blogosphere,” “warblog” etc.), also strikes me as a very insular term, created and used by and for those who “get it,” who are part of the clique as it were. (This to say nothing of even more insular (war)blogging-only terms like “Fisking” (definition here)). When you start to step away from it for a moment, it all does start to seem just a tad bit impervious, and not very welcoming.

The other day, Brendan O’Neill (one of the very few political bloggers, er, writers, worth reading these days, in my humble opinion), wrote about the grossly inflated importance some have started to attribute to blogs with respect to coverage of the upcoming US attack on Iraq. Not only various warbloggers, but also the British Guardian newspaper, no less, have been putting forth the suggestion that it will be blogs, not CNN or other traditional media, that will be leading the pack in breaking and covering the story. (Let’s just say that aside from the preposterous nature of this suggestion, the premise on which it is made is inherently false, as CNN will hardly be “breaking” anything other than what they and the US government want you to hear.) O’Neill rightfully scoffs at the notion, and takes aim at the insular, juvenile mentality that breeds such posturing:

The most striking thing about these blogging claims is how self-obsessed and cocky they are. For every internet geek licking his lips at the prospect of reading bloggers’ views about Iraq, there must be thousands of people who wouldn’t know what a blog was if it Fisked their ass. I have five brothers, all of whom are intelligent, read newspapers, watch TV news and are generally interested in the world around them. None of them knows what a weblog is.

Of course, I’m just as guilty as the rest, not only for my boosterist post the other day, but for writing that, through use of certain language, has oftentimes been speaking to the converted, so to speak. I do struggle with it, trying to come up with more real-world alternatives to “blog” or “post” or “blogger” (this very post, I mean, article notwithstanding).

Eventually, of course, these now-insular terms will enter the mainstream, and I suppose that’s one argument for their use, to quicken their acceptance, although it will surely not be as quick as some expect. When it does reach that public consciousness level, I hope I will remind myself not to thumb my noses and exclaim how I was there at the beginning (which is laughably far off the mark to begin with). I do find it unfortunate, however, that folks will be saying “blog” to describe this thing that some of us to. If I had my druthers, I would much rather have “weblog” be the term they use, but I’m beginning to resign myself to that never happening.

Word count:
blog = 13
blogger = 5
blogging = 8

I started this as a comment at Fragments ~ From Floyd, but then I thought to myself, I’ve been leaving long comments at sites recently and perhaps I should utilize my Trackback feature more. Sending a ping to Fragments also allows me to send a plug for this fine site, and its fine scribe Fred, writer of fragments small in nature, local in tone, and large and welcoming in reach.

But Fred has been undergoing a crisis of late, one that I suspect not a few bloggers have been wrestling with, yours included. In a post ominously entitled “Silence of the Lambs,” Fred writes:

How can I sit here and ignore this mountain of woe while I gush about the joy and wonder or tiny ills in the life on the fringes of the kingdom, content to be in the world, but not of it, but guilty at the same time for seeming indifference?

What Fred is referring to should be obvious to anyone, and if it isn’t, then well, you are not only _not_ writing or reading about the impending war the US will be waging in Iraq, but not thinking about it either (and that, my friends, is quite frankly an untenable position in my humble opinion).

I myself have started and aborted a few pieces recently about my thoughts on this war, in the end deciding for one reason or another that I wasn’t comfortable with what I wrote, in style, in substance, in applicability, in importance — in short, for the usual reasons one factors in when they click on either the “Publish” or “Delete Entry” button.

(As I’ve used “war” now twice in the piece, here would be a good time to dredge up part of one of those aborted articles:

Let’s get real for a moment and call a spade a spade, shall we. When the so-called “war” happens, it’ll be an attack against Iraq, not a “war,” no matter what Bush and the media conglomerates already have already slotted in.

)

And it’s happened at least once that an entirely innocent-intentioned piece was turned by my unwitting fingers into a plea for…for what?! I don’t know, a plea perhaps for my own language, my own way, accountability for my actions, culpability for actions done in my name. I wanted to take back the night. John Berger wrote recently:

The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends, to a large degree, on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny’s nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.

In an earlier post at Fragments ~ from Floyd, on February 14, wherein Fred implored his readers to read the complete text of US Senator Robert Byrd’s Senate floor speech of February 12th, I found this comment from one of those very readers Fred was appealing to:

Fred, I have enjoyed your fine articles about life in Floyd…but you will lose me with political discussions, especially if the ideology is the same as Sen Byrd. Please don’t disappoint…

_Please don’t disappoint_. Now I don’t know the person who wrote that from Adam or Eve, but on the face of it I should be reading that statement as a beseeching plea from a loyal reader, an appeal thrown back at Fred to get off his soap box. But it comes across differently to me. I read that statement and see rather a bully threat, a puffed up chest, a figurative fist grabbing at the shirt collar. _Don’t disappoint us. Don’t let us down. We’re counting on you to be a team player, so don’t get out of line_.

With friends like these, who needs….

I was reading another site tonight as well, Kyren.com, where in a post dated February 17, the site’s author writes:

Sometimes my site feels like a Jane Austen novel. A world of small worries and joys, not bothered by threats and power struggles from the outside world. It may seem like I don’t concern myself with issues like that. War. No war. Truth is, I do.[…] But posting stuff here is like having a cup of tea with Emma Woodhouse or Marianne Dashwood.[…]

But rather than opting out of the debate, might it not be that the “small worries and joys” Kyren is discussing over tea with 18th-century characters are as part of the debate as Byrd’s impassioned speech or Bush’s puppetry, or all the insta’ punditry in between?

And rather than opting out of some phantom promise of his home-spun site, might not Fred’s guilt over the “mountain of woe” that is tugging at him be as corporeal as the lovingly detailed articles he’s been writing about past loves, watching the ice grow, and the place he calls home among the Blue Ridge Parkway?

Two sides of the same coin: being accountable to oneself first, readers second, if they choose to come along. I’m still struggling myself with how my thoughts, despair, hope, protest, disgust, will manifest itself here. But I do so on the premise that I share the same coin. And on the premise that the struggle is the point.