It is not by accident that the term ‘blogging’ sounds like a human ablution. The results, it must be said, are often startling similar. Keeping a diary is one thing. Deciding to share your thoughts in a wholly unfettered, completely unfiltered manner is something best done in power-ballad form and not on the Internet where other people might actually read it. Frankly, if the excesses of blogging cannot be curbed, then it’s high time we considered abandoning the Internet altogether and made the move back to carrier pigeons and Telex machines.
It is not by accident that the term ‘blogging’ sounds like a human ablution. The results, it must be said, are often startling similar. Keeping a diary is one thing. Deciding to share your thoughts in a wholly unfettered, completely unfiltered manner is something best done in power-ballad form and not on the Internet where other people might actually read it. Frankly, if the excesses of blogging cannot be curbed, then it’s high time we considered abandoning the Internet altogether and made the move back to carrier pigeons and Telex machines.
Previously, technology had what I call ‘in-built’ limits. You had to confine yourself in terms of your message for fear that a pigeon, if over-burdened, might plunge into the ocean and leave your missive undelivered. Ramble on too much and your Telex message could easily take several days to deliver and result in a phone bill that looked more like the Gross Domestic Product figure of a medium-sized South American country. Probably Peru. But now the need to curtail personal excess has been dispensed with and over-sharing is the order of the day. No thought, no matter how trivial, should be allowed to go unpublished.
Granted, there are those who might argue some platforms for what I refer to as ‘projectile thought vomiting’ by their nature impose brevity. No doubt, such brave souls would nominate ‘Twitter’ and its one hundred forty characters as a glistening beacon of restraint. Those people are wrong. There’s not much point in limiting the number of characters if you don’t also limit the number of ‘tweets’. If users were, say, restricted to sending one message a day, its supporters would have a point. That, sadly, is not the case. Instead, hoards of useless tweets clog up the atmosphere and threaten to block out the sun, thus extinguishing life as we know it.
Truth be told, a lot of pretty stupid thoughts pass between my ears on a daily basis. Can you use sour cream as a substitute for milk in coffee? Is there any risk that gravity might one day start to wear out, enabling us to fly? Would a newly released Schapelle Corby make a decent midfield coach for the Melbourne Football Club? For the most part, I have the good sense to keep these random ideas very much to myself, lest I should seem to the world at large to be a complete idiot. But blogging, in its various incarnations, encourages people to abandon self-censorship in pursuit of content, no matter how useless.
Where does the term ‘blogging’ come from anyway? It’s not like the Earl of Blog decided one night to jump on his laptop during a break in a poker game to share whatever was on his mind. Nor was it found at the bottom of a Petri dish along with a small colony of mould. It must be said, there’s something about the name that just seems wrong. ‘Blogging’ does not sound like an on-line diary. Rather, it’s the sound that gumboots make when walking through deep mud in the back paddock. Indeed, as a kid, I would be required to give my boots a wash after blogging up near the chook shed. Back then, ‘blogging’ was a danger to the carpet but not much else.
Perhaps I’m lucky. It would have been disastrous had my every thought appeared on the Internet when I was in high school. There’s a very real chance that I would still be repeating Year 9 were that the case. Then again, what I did back then may be a thousand times worse. Rather than ‘blog’ or keep a diary, I poured my thoughts into songs. Worse still, I decided that the best way to communicate these pieces of emotional spillage was to sing them myself. That I had a voice I’d now describe as ‘disturbed funk walrus’ made things even worse.
But being a terrible singer with not very good songs had its up side. It meant there was an in-built limit to how much I embarrassed myself. Just like a carrier pigeon or Telex machine can act as a restraint, so too did my natural lack of ability. When I performed, it was usually just to the guy behind the bar being paid twelve dollars an hour. Before then, nobody knew what the singular for ‘audience’ was. Somewhere between finishing my set and wondering whether there was any point to performing an encore, I decided it was probably ‘audient’. When singing your heart out to an audient, there’s little doubt as to who heckled you part way through the second verse. Upon reflection, I wasn’t singing. I was blogging.
Perhaps I’m just jealous. Maybe I find it difficult to comprehend that something I happen to judge as not being worth very much manages to find so extensive an audience almost in spite of itself. The abandonment of intellectual rigour, to say nothing of conventional grammar – it’s all a little confronting. But that’s okay. ‘Blogging’, in one form or another, is one of those human activities to which people are irresistibly drawn. Like yawning or picking your nose, it’s is simply a part of life. It may be no bad thing. If nothing else, tapping out your thoughts and posting them in cyberspace may still be a whole lot better than the caterwauling of a funk walrus, performing his self-penned song cycle to an audient in an otherwise empty bar. Blog away. It could be worse.