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Blogging Thoughts on Thoughts on Blogging
Tonight I went to a Seattle Weblogger Meetup. I was just not the same since Anita was sick and could not make it.
It was a little thin this month but most of the conversation was around Athima Chansanchai who is a reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She was researching for an article about blogging. I was pretty fun to talk to her about the how and whys of blogging. People went into why they write, create and share ideas online.
Each website authors compulsion to create was different and it was cool to have some one ask you the simple question about why and how that gets you thinking about why you actually do this.
Blogging can be a form of therapy, narcissism and the abstract desire to share and idea that dates back to painting pictures on the side of caves. There are some blog haters that frown on user created content but I say Bollocks to them. The internet is a free global medium that can give a voice to all of us with out crowding anyone out or shouting anyone down. I don't think that the internet should be full of nothing but corporate run pages set up by publishers wanting to sell advertising spaces of a company trying to sell a product.
Time spent enjoying an user created content like a blog, podcast, photo or illustration gallery is just as legitimate a way to spend your free time as sipping the swill that corporate Hollywood and the massive media monopolies want to sell you. I don't care about Toby Keith, The Back Street Boys and Hilliary Duff.
I would rather spend my spare time looking at tourist pictures taken on a trip to Tokyo on Flickr or reading a blog written by a real person that I can relate to. I think I would rather get a view of a totally foreign place to me like Iran through browsing photo blogs created by citizen photographers living there rather than some talking head blow hards on a corporate owned 24 hour news channel that does not really seem to every say anything of intellectual value.
I believe in a theory of intellectual media nutrition and I often enjoy the natural pesticide-free and preservative organic media made by real people rather than only filling my head with thirty second sound clips from the non stop idiot box. I believe that the internet can bring people together a little bit more. It is a bloody shame that Marshall McLuhan did not live to see this.
Update: Jom from Finland had a damn good comment that I thought I would put on the main page. Here is Jom's comment.
I've been reading your blog for about a year now. The funny thing is that I don't know why I'm doing it. This is my first comment here.
I can't remember why 8bitjoystick or actually any of the other blogs I read ended up on my list of regularly visited sites. Its very hard to explain what blogs are about using conventional definitions of what's informative and entertaining. Reading blogs for me is more like watching seasons change. Sometimes it's entertaining, most of the times its indifferent. Sometimes something draws a reaction from me, this time it was your comments on mass media and blogging.
My friends and relatives think its weird that I should prefer to spend my evening reading stuff like your blog or Martin Luther King's speeches or whatever on the internet, when I could be watching Fear Factor on the telly. It must be baffling to see someone submerged in thought looking at a screenful of text when there are so many exiting things to watch and games to play. I think there still exists a strong misconception of the internet as a form of media related to television just because its digested through a display, when in fact its a form of highly elastic literature.
This misconception is, in my opinion, also visible in many internet sites that have been designed thinking along the conventional assumptions of mass media. I've sometimes visited the so-called fan sites of famous recording artists, maintained by their record labels, that only reproduce the fundamental idea of a one-sided marketing push of a TV ad rather than bring anything new or interesting into the picture.
Ok, no more ranting. In conclusion: blogs rock !
Jake at August 18, 2005 
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Comments
I just thought I'd stop by and say 'Hi'. You left such a nice comment on my post about Black Bottle. It's great to hear feedback like that and I'm glad you enjoyed the place!
Thanks!
Posted by: megwoo at August 18, 2005 5:09 PM
I've been reading your blog for about a year now. The funny thing is that I don't know why I'm doing it. This is my first comment here.
I can't remember why 8bitjoystick or actually any of the other blogs I read ended up on my list of regularly visited sites. Its very hard to explain what blogs are about using conventional definitions of what's informative and entertaining. Reading blogs for me is more like watching seasons change. Sometimes it's entertaining, most of the times its indifferent. Sometimes something draws a reaction from me, this time it was your comments on mass media and blogging.
My friends and relatives think its weird that I should prefer to spend my evening reading stuff like your blog or Martin Luther King's speeches or whatever on the internet, when I could be watching Fear Factor on the telly. It must be baffling to see someone submerged in thought looking at a screenful of text when there are so many exiting things to watch and games to play. I think there still exists a strong misconception of the internet as a form of media related to television just because its digested through a display, when in fact its a form of highly elastic literature.
This misconception is, in my opinion, also visible in many internet sites that have been designed thinking along the conventional assumptions of mass media. I've sometimes visited the so-called fan sites of famous recording artists, maintained by their record labels, that only reproduce the fundamental idea of a one-sided marketing push of a TV ad rather than bring anything new or interesting into the picture.
Ok, no more ranting. In conclusion: blogs rock !
Posted by: jom at August 19, 2005 1:02 AM
Yeah.. Right on!
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at August 19, 2005 1:52 AM
Yeah.. Right on!
Posted by: Jake of 8bitjoystick.com at August 19, 2005 1:52 AM
