“Oh good. Only 118,673,465 blogs still up”
Gray Trudeau, Doonesbury, Sunday October 19, 2008
I have enjoyed posting on this blog and expect that I will continue to do so with fair consistency – weather, work load, other singular distractions and interesting subject matter permitting. However, I have to ask myself what might be the enticement for doing so in light of no reasonable assurance that anyone, anywhere is reading it. Since I have no interest in making a living doing this, in attracting advertisements or other means of income, or in measuring the number of hits to the blog, why bother? Why post to a blog when you are nothing more than one small noise in a hurricane?
I had to laugh at myself when I read Doonesbury this weekend and saw the above.
The internet is a truly special place for many of us, and I have learned to respect it for what it is – a means of open and free expression available to anyone, anywhere, regardless of race, religion, politics, or personal attribute. I first came to understand this when watching my youngest son spend what I then believed to be an inordinate amount of time on the internet during his formative years. As concerned parents, my wife and I began to lecture him on the amount of time he spent on line, worried about his school work and his social development in real time. One day, it suddenly dawned upon me that my son, who happens to be hearing impaired in real time, suffered from no impairment whatsoever while on line, and that during his time on line he was on a level playing field with everyone else with whom he might be dealing. In short, I had this epiphany: for him, being on line was a form of liberation and I was trying to restrict his liberty. Recognizing this at last, my wife and I toned down the level of our objections significantly in favor of letting him become whomever he might choose to become in this world that was so enticing to him and so foreign to us.
My son has grown into a responsible adult and is undertaking a post-graduate degree in – what else? – digital information management. His first love remains all things digitized, and the digitized world will be his vocation, avocation and, I hope, his oyster. I have come to believe that he is one of those truly rare persons who knows what he is made for from birth. He began using a computer at age 2. As I have watched him develop, I have enjoyed sharing with him his interest in cutting edge discussions and debates on the subject of managing digitized information and have become increasingly aware of the power of the internet – for both good and bad.
It was my sense of his feelings of liberation that caused me to consider posting to a blog of my own. I thought about doing so for several months before actually trying it out, somewhat hesitantly, last month. There are many things in the world that puzzle and delight me, and one of those has come to be the feeling that I can say whatever I wish to say in a place where anyone can read it. Posting to a blog is somewhat akin to writing graffiti on a high wall – people may notice it or not, may be annoyed by it or not, and may, or may not, even see some art in the result. The fact is, however, that it is your graffiti and your art, and the enticement of posting it lies in the ability to make a public statement in a manner meaningful to the author – even when it is unknown whether the public is interested in it.
I think this explains why there are blogs on almost every subject under the sun. Any time someone posts to a blog, it represents a statement, publicly made, about something of personal interest and importance. Anyone else can read or ignore it at their whim. The fact that others may ignore your particular post is irrelevant to the joy of knowing that you have publicly plead your case.
I will continue down this path for my own enjoyment if for no other reason. After all, I always, secretly, wanted to be the one with the spray can next to that vacant brick wall, but was too respectful of private property to try it. So, until some byte hugger starts a campaign to “save the bytes,” I can, and will, feel free to post here and to have my say.
