What’s Up?

This blog is a year old today, so this stacking-up/piling-on of posts has completed a natural cycle of sorts. Here’s a few thoughts about the new instant self-publishing to mark the occasion.

By their very nature blogs grow by superimposition, the blogger adding on to the top of a pile of stuff that’s already there, like the earth’s laying down layers of geology one on top of another, or someone adding chips to a stack, one at a time. For me, that’s where the uniqueness of blogs lie: a lot of the pleasure of going to a blog is the sense of freshness that comes as each new entry appears first thing up at the top of the page. And along with its unpredictable content, the new post on top of the heap most closely represents the present state of the blogger. Out of all the countless possibilities, the new post is exactly what the blogger has chosen it to be; everything about it comes from the blogger’s most recent decisions. (If we’re not our choices, what are we?) Even in the case of a political blog whose content is driven by events in the world primarily, the tone and length of a post result from the final decisions made by the blogger at the time the post is entered.

When you open a book you begin way back at the beginning with the earliest and therefore oldest content in some basic sense, even if the book isn’t structured chronologically. But when you open a blog you start at the end.....well, not actually at the end, because like most things still existing, there isn’t any end yet, there’s only the latest version, the newest and rawest update. Essentially that’s where a blog and the reader start, at the top of the present, before it too slips down into the past and becomes yet another part of a record of a work in progress.

I began a year ago with the idea of communication, of the private becoming public. When you add an entry into a purely private journal or diary, it’s as though you’re talking into a dead microphone, for your ears only. The message of the medium of Weblogs is that you can connect just about everywhere in an instant if you choose. You can put up or shut up, you can open up or clam up, but if you do publish a post on a blog, such a minuscule detail of social life in all its simplicity is available to anyone who might be interested, starting right now, all over the planet. Just a matter of getting that stuff up there on a monitor, and leaving it.