Principium

Launching a personal blog is not a particularly momentous event in 2006, either for an individual or for a community; rather the opposite. However, as cyberspace is par excellence the realm of fantasy, I will indulge my own sense that I am accomplishing something significant by beginning my very own blog, and comment on my motivation for doing so.

I have serious reservations about blogging. Overall, blogging seems to exacerbate that trivialization of everything that is so endemic in the current cultural climate. As if talking heads and blaring I-pods weren't enough, now we have half-digested opinions being vomited forth by the very Gorgon of information that was already turning our hearts to stone. Okay, so I'm being melodramatic, but the advent of blogging seems to portend more damage to public discourse in the 21st century than otherwise. The freedom with which many offer their opinions, and the significance which they attach to them, not to mention the deplorably poor manner in which those opinions are usually expressed, all would appear to have an adverse effect on the discussion of, well, anything. (Nota bene: I do appreciate the irony involved in my expression of these thoughts.)

But then there is the additional fact that forums for public discourse really don't exist anymore. Even if we knew what a town meeting was, we wouldn't know how to conduct one now. And interpersonal discussion on a private level is usually limited by the fact that everyone seems to be so damnably busy these days. Electronic communication is generally more successful than other forms, but a sustained conversation is still surprisingly difficult to come by.

My dilemma is this: I have things I want to say, and I have nowhere to say them. So I suppose that I will join the other shards of my fragmented society and start opinionating on the Internet.