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9.2.03
I confess. Here I am supposedly writing
and updating a blog, and yet is it actually a blog? When
is a blog not a blog? When it calls itself one but fails
to show the usual characteristics.
Biographical information (1): I started
out fairly 'literary', specialising in English, getting
a teaching qualification in the same, and reading lots
of novels. Then I took a side-step into alternative self-employment.
More recently I've spent hundreds of hours exploring the
Internet, grappling with Dreamweaver and other kinds of
interface, reading Internet-critical books, and getting
an MA in Creative Technology.
(2) I am an Internet enthusiast more
than a blog enthusiast. I remember my excitement and yes,
fear, when I first went online. I didn't know what was
going to happen. I hadn't used computers very much and
for me it was a leap into a new digital terrain which
I could not control. Suddenly my computer was hooked up,
and what was going to happen?
(3) I wasn't there in the 60s - no I
really wasn't there, not absent in the sense of drug based
abandon. But I've spend hundreds of hours reading spiritual
and philosophical books; Camus and Sartre led me to them.
If life was existentially meaningless and mostly 'inauthentic',
then what gives? What's the freakin' point? I did some
major catching up on a social era that was probably not
the romantic rebellion it supposedly was. In fact my catching
up was far more than that - the 60s were a kind of adolescence,
and I've studied some serious stuff like Vedanta, the
Bhagavad Gita, Tao te Ching, kaballa, Zen, Sufism, Theosophy,
Gurdjieff, alchemy symbolism, Jung, Alice Bailey books
etc. They're not comics - it's adult reading. My late
father once said "I was born for it". Yes, I was. He was
concerned that it was the kind of studying you do towards
the end of your life, unsuitable for a young man making
his way in the world. He meant well; how nice it is to
have people that care for you like that. As well as my
reading, I've practised serious spiritual meditation for
nearly twenty years.
I like to question things. I have a
feeling for the Internet which roughly corresponds to
what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere (optional
link: YOU
DON'T HAVE TO CLICK HERE). However, while the Internet
inspires me as a social and cultural space, and blogs
are based on it's democratic and empowering ideals, most
blogs disappoint me. There, I've said it. As with the
Internet at large, there is a very high noise-to-signal
ratio in blogdom. I'm ambivalent about blogging. As in
life, so on the 'net: how many people can actually write
creative, intelligent, entertaining words?
We're all better at some things than
others. I'm crap at football and earning money, but I
think I'm OK with words. I learned to enjoy their power
at an early age, and in the last few years I've begun
to enjoy them again. Not that Recumbent Gaze is up in
the higher levels of elevated literary cyberspace - I'm
not saying that. What I am saying is I'm evaluating and
thinking about these things, not just going along with
them. And I write about it in a half-decent way. Sometimes.
OK. This
site is what inspired me to put fingers to keyboard on
this pleasant Saturday morning. It is radically different
from the blog, and yet it is beautiful word-smithery.
I like reading it, more than most blogs. John Scalzi is
a professional writer and knows his way around the English
language. He doesn't link all over the place; he writes
elegant, entertaining copy, offering his own content rather
than brief commentary. And look at the design, or rather
non-design. It's exactly like the printed page, with no
supporting graphics. It's not web-cool, but just read
it. This is good stuff. Black words, on a white background.
To me it feels tranquil, considerably more quiet
than the average blog. Linking all over the place, suggesting
that blogdom is a vast conversation in which you can participate,
is relatively noisy. It's like reading a book, compared
to turning the dial on a radio and traversing both white
noise and occasional transmissions.
In short, I'm not sure how I feel about
blogdom, and whether I prefer simple writing. Recumbent
Gaze is a mixture of both, and I've not yet embraced one
of the defining features of the blog - establishing my
place within the mutual link society. If they'd have me.
And I'm not sure they would.
I like quiet spaces. A book is a quiet
space; a conventional blog is not. Are you reading what
I have to say here, or are you whizzing off to other web
locations or intellectual ideas? How does it feel to do
one rather than the other? What is the Internet best at,
and what do you want/like to do with it? In this point-and-click,
video-game age I know which is more popular. But I haven't
decided if I prefer one compared to the other.
Update 28.2.3:
Maybe the answer is....I like both.
A quiet place for elegant writing, and a noisier interactive
place which is like a conversation. To date, I've only
gone halfway with the latter - maybe not even that - because
I don't (yet) have a comment system.
Update 2.5.03: John Scalzi has recently
changed his site from conventional editorial to a Movable
Type interface, thus scuppering my own editorial. Damn
you! ;-)
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