MAY BLOGGERY THRIVE!

“Isn’t it all a bit sad, this blogging thing?” Mike asked. “Millions of agoraphobics snuggled up next to their laptops, sending lonely messages to people they’re never going to meet. All somewhat ubernerd, message-in-a-bottle stuff, isn’t it?”

He sipped the top off his pint of Guinness and peered sardonically at me over the rim.  I flashed him my dangerous smile – that momentary flicker at the corner of the upper lip – and, as if sensing the electricity in the air, the pub fell silent.

With the speed of a striking cobra I drove my bunched fist into his face, sensing with satisfaction at the moment of impact the crunch of bone and the rending of tissue. Without even a low moan, he tipped over the back of his chair and lay crumpled and senseless against the foot rail of the bar…

...

Yes, like you I have, on occasion in the past, had to defend our noble pastime against the sceptics and the ignorati. For six years I have been a passionate blogger with a powerful sense of purpose and direction, calm in my certainty that I shall be found in great age slumped peacefully over my keyboard, taken in mid-sentence. Now, a couple of months into my seventh year, blogging is the new mainstream black, everyone in the world is on Facebook and the zeitgeist boys and girls are tweeting on Twitter (“I just breathed in. Now I just breathed out...”)

So what about we veterans? Where do we place ourselves on the ever-expanding blogospheric spectrum? Well, at times I still feel a little like an early riser who slung his towel down on a more or less deserted beach at dawn and woke up at lunchtime surrounded by state-of-the-art sun-loungers. For me, as for so many others, it’s been a long, strange trip from those early inflexible templates to the bling-loaded blogs of today. In these nano-historical times in which we look back with dewy-eyed nostalgia to events as long ago as last week, a glance further back through the mists of time might provide perspective. 

With the development of website creation software obviating the need for HTML skills, and the interposition of interactive technology, there emerged the simple weblog and the basic blogger. Although many – probably most – early bloggers were, in fact, well versed in all things IT, there were plenty of techno hicks-from-the-sticks like myself following eagerly where they led. Bravely tackling early Blogger protocols (or in my case the leaky, steam-driven clunk-and-grind of Radio Userland), we proudly posted our pics or our poems or our recipes for authentic lobster thermidor. Most of us absorbed procedures and picked up on new developments on the hoof. Biting lips and gritting teeth in the wake of yet another system crash in which three hours of carefully prepared material disappeared into the ether and drawing on the patience and forbearance of the techies, we learned how to manage our blogs.

And we found that, with a little perseverance and some networking within the rapidly expanding genre-based communities, casual visitors became friends and the villages became towns. So that now we are each a part of a circle of bloggers with whom we share aspects of our outer and inner worlds of which only a handful of our real space friends may be aware.

In the first instance, it might be supposed that the intimacy of contact and communication that we enjoy is a unique property of the strange e-world that we inhabit. But I have met up in that real space with enough bloggers with whom I conduct such online relationships to be able to say that, in the flesh, nothing is lost in translation.  In meeting up, the only initial curiosity is the absence of the social foreplay that characterises first encounters. Once the drinks are bought and we’re all sat around the table, it’s business as usual.

So here we are still, bobbing around in a vast ocean of enterprise and transformation, surrounded by the experimenters and iconoclasts who drive the medium forward towards the next world changing innovation. Our blogs are, in their way, archaisms, strange little islands of traditional measured chatter – slow reads in a fast world. And yet to manipulate the processes and progress towards new forms that will make that murmurous yet intense café communication even more comfortable, we must maintain constant awareness of the development of the medium. A survival paradox of the 21st century with a wider application, maybe.

Blogs come and go. In recent months a small but crucial clutch of those for whom I have the highest regard have gone quiet. But enough of us are either driven by the imperative of l’art pour l’art or simply crazy in love with the sound of our own voice to carry on. And long may we thrive.