On Blogging

I've created so many blogs, some of which have provided a nourishing framework in which to develop my ideas, yet they fall into all kinds of traps-- I post a couple times and then the blog just languishes, I don't keep a consistent focus, or I share too much about my life and then have to remove the blog from public display. Let's see if I can find some way to keep myself committed to this blog. I've obviously had an on and off relationship with blogging, but I find so much value in publishing my thoughts for anyone to read, without having to seek approval from a hierarchy of editors. One of the amazing things about intelligent blogs is that there's an inherent academic validity, or at least a genuine quality, without any kind of established standards or enforced rules. I imagine Wikipedia, for instance, would be more reliable if not for pranksters and incompetent writers with delusions of grandeur *. The open, uncontrolled format of the blog certainly allows for false information or carelessly presented information to appear on a respectably-designed blog, which can fool some people into thinking the information itself is respectable, accurate, erudite. I write later about the different forces pulling at the blog form, but for now, it is enough to say that the use of the blog by respectable people to share information quickly without interference by editors or censors is awe-inspiring and spectacular. As for my own blog, I'm glad to have a couple of models to follow, such as Anthropik and No Impact Man (which you can now visit from my revised links selection in the sidebar to the right of the page). Posts vary from academic responses to personal insights, with an occasional hodge podge of bullet points thrown in. I expect I'll fall into the same pattern.

I have had several initial ideas about the purpose of this blog. My first, broad goal was to get myself communicating with the world about my unconventional ideas about unknown subjects and undiscussed concerns. I wanted to move away from personal anecdote blogging to more scholarly writing about books I read, events I attend, and such. This purpose fused with a higher academic standard, an intention to weave together my interest in the not-so-well-known movement of primitivism with more well-known theory and mainstream philosophy. In conjunction with a seminar I am enrolled in at present, my personal blogging project of finally giving voice to my uncommon ideas has grown into a clear intent to share my work with my immediate academic community and to engage the larger community in this focused dialogue about primitivism and related issues. I guess I got too sick of constant self-criticism in the style of "If I am in the severe minority in my way of thinking about these things, perhaps I am wrong, or crazy, or just plain incompetent," and decided I would at least find out how remote my ideas were from those of others before I continued thinking in that vein.

These initial ideas developed over a long enough span of time that I reconsidered my wish to leave behind self-interested blogging for academic writing. I'm not sure any more that including some discussion of my subjective experience of the academic community is equivalent to self-indulgent writing. About that subjectivity...my personal and deeply emotional experience of the academic community and the alienation I feel there, not to mention my lack of a sense of belonging, which I actually have no problem with--let me make that clear, but it is such a strange, unique, awkward, and therefore, as I said, emotional experience that it seems I need to give voice to that experience, or even that it needs me to give voice to it, to name it in a community that disavows, dis-acknowledges it, even though the condition exists and has long existed, even though the problem persists. In my plans for this blog I, uncharacteristically, intended to be objective in some way, but I've never been able to accept objectivity as any kind of valid goal (I understand that many people practically worship the concept, especially for activities of high esteem, such as legal rulings or psychological experiments, but I have little patience with the idea that human beings have the capacity to exclude their own biases of any size from their deliberations and analyses) so I'm not sure why I didn't question myself on that sooner. Hence, my original purpose of separating the academic from the personal is a little naïve. Though I will try to keep my anecdotes and personal essays either brief or highly relevant, I have decided to pursue a very human approach to the academic topics I will grapple with in these electronic pages. I really am not naïve enough, as it seems many academics are, to presume that I can excise myself from the larger picture, the greater whole. That is the course I'm delineating for this project. If you object, please don't waste too much of your time trying to convince me I am wrong in my approach. Though I question the validity of some of my beliefs on the basis that I am the odd one out in relation to everybody else, I do not question my approach to expressing those beliefs and other thoughts. Kindly move along if you cannot reconcile yourself to my method of going about discussing these issues.

I briefly mentioned my blogging history above, but for the interested, I can detail it now, this being a post on blogging, after all. The uninterested may kindly skip ahead two to four paragraphs. In any case, my personal blogging story: Due to a server crash in early 2004, my first blog, named after my favorite band, died. The little community that constituted Kmorg (pronounced "Kay Morg") nurtured my fledgling blogging efforts and provided a comfortable space for a disgruntled high schooler to work through her ideas and disillusionment at the time. Kmorg was short for Killing Machines.Org; however odd that little detail might sound, especially when considering my interests and motivations, it was actually a very gentle, pleasant, and aesthetically-pleasing website, functioning as an independent weblog community with maybe 2,000 users. The same people then went on to host a similar project, HateLife, which promptly disintegrated for the same reason. Many Kmorg users like myself were disheartened that the inputs of time and money necessary to revive Kmorg were not available. The Kmorg operators were, however, kind enough to provide archives of the journal texts (no archives of the beautiful, picturesque sunset background, though) and recommendations of other blogging communities. They directed me to the blogging behemoths of the time, LiveJournal and Blogger (today, WordPress and TypePad enjoy similar popularity).

I chose Blogger for its simple design and devoted following. I figured a blog-hosting service with millions of users could manage its server issues, but I spent a little bit of time in late 2004 dabbling with LiveJournal because, for whatever reason, my friends preferred it. I spent much time with my primary Blogger blog during the 04-05 school year (which, incidentally, marked my first year of college), chronicling the eccentric behaviors of my friends and the notable experiences of that exciting first year, but when I returned home after having enjoyed one of my most valued life experiences in the summer of 2005, when I traveled to Brasil to learn about permaculture, I found I could neither convey what I wanted to about what I'd learned and experienced, nor could I keep up with the pace of my sophomore year in college and maintain a blog about my day-to-day experiences. After that, my blogs received much less attention from me for several years, with occasional posts and reorganization of my Blogger work space, but none of the intensive upkeep that I had maintained in my first year of blogging.

I now look back on much of my writing (as well as the writing of that Kmorg community as whole) from that time, that first dedicated year of blogging, as petty, but at the time blogging was a much-needed and much-appreciated outlet. Thanks to the retrospective view, I now understand the blight of blogging as a combination of the following: writing that is self-absorbed, hard to follow, illogical, unfocused, trite, too detailed/littered with inside jokes and references to have import for a wider community, unedited, and has no element of peer-editing (however informal, there is no connection to opposing views or bibliographic sources or a world beyond that specific blog), those kinds of things. As I do with many other elements of my life, I will fret about whether or not my writing fits my own criteria for decent share-able information, whether as a blog or as any kind of published material, but I view such fretting in a good light, in that perpetual consideration of the criteria, perpetual questioning can only make a piece of writing sharper, less unwieldy, more robust. If I learned nothing else from blogging over the years, I see how blogs serve different purposes and, accordingly, come in different kinds. The forum for a teenager's angst or venting is distinct from and incomparable to a critic's space for sharing reviews, stories, photos, excerpts, etc.. Yet both kinds, and many other special formats, are hosted on Blogger.

Though I would enjoy seeing a new standard and perhaps a separate space for blogging by intelligent people, if not people involved in Academia (say, an autodidact or unschooled high school student with insights galore), I do value the overall framework provided by blog-hosting websites for enhancing dialogue in general and for quickening the speed at which ideas can be shared. Though personal publishing may be so pervasive that it discredits the whole community participating in it, a discrediting that can occur by the mediocritizing force (the force that pushes accomplishments toward mediocrity) of overwhelming involvement by a mass in an activity, by the mainstreaming and overusing of a medium by all kinds of people, in which the uneducated, impolite, or irrelevant ideas of a few can mar the perception of all, it is kind of unfair. Personal publishing might be an eerily popular phenomenon, but how does that eeriness translate into a dismissal of decent work or intriguing works-in-progress on the grounds that the sharing of ideas by all kinds of people in all kinds of ways makes the medium entirely trite and worthless, without merit? That argument hits a little too close to elitism for me. Nothing else to say about my blogging history and outlook on blogging mediocracy (apparently that isn't a word, but I so wish it were, and spelled that way, too, that I'm going ahead and using it).

Since I am taking advantage of the phenomenon of personal publishing to share my thoughts with a wider audience, causing myself little to no hassle to publish my writing, I don't see why a little discussion of copyright wouldn't be useful, and so to begin...What force does a blog's implied copyright actually have? Posing that question more broadly, what kinds of values do copyrights perpetuate? I struggle with what kind of respect to give not only intellectual property laws but also the rationales behind them. Due to the increased access to information and self-publishing services spawned by the last century's increased connectivity, we are surrounded by ubiquitous soundbytes, ubiquitous memoirs, ubiquitous advertisements, bland photographs, unedited blog posts, unfinished webpages, illogical articles, unorganized nonfiction, boring fiction, pointless video clips, etc.. In that kind of unfiltered, information overload context, what worth does personal publishing online have, and what of copyrights? I have heard too many horror stories about the hundred year-old "Happy Birthday" song's creators extracting loyalties, of the hampered creative impulse of a writer who crafted a unique piece of fiction from the perspective of a character in another piece of fiction, in that case Gone With the Wind. Related horror stories about Monsanto's patenting of seed bring even more questions into view. The recent popularity of the Creative Commons license and open source code marks a tremendous shift in established modes of thinking about intellectual property. I find this shift in thinking very uplifting, in that there is new hope for breaking up the concentrated power of copyright-holders and breaking up the monotony of the stalemated discussion on changing intellectual property law. Whether or not lawmakers and officials were interested in letting copyright law evolve, the Creative Commons people took matters into their hands, as did other individuals and groups working toward similar aims.

The Creative Commons' definition from their website:

This isn't my area of study (there are many more informed sources for an interested reader to explore), but it has always concerned me, so I thought it valuable to include some of my thoughts about copyright in a blog hosted on Blogger, which used to provide an informal copyright signature at the bottom of each blog. Because I've grown up with "all rights reserved" literature and legality, I'm accustomed to thinking about writers and creators as deserving of special attention, personal financial gain, and ongoing intake of loyalties. But in a collaborative world, where creative material will be shared one way or another and connections drawn among vastly different works in the constant unfolding of thought and creativity, the Creative Commons license of "some rights reserved" makes much more sense. If you wish to elaborate on my words or to connect my ideas to others I haven't considered, to share my writing with others or incorporate quotes from it into a paper, I will not hunt you down. Feel free to communicate with me about your own endeavors. If you do, I will not put a damper on discussion by requesting a donation or, worse yet, suing for such contribution. Let a Creative Commons-type copyright apply to my writing in this blog. I will consider applying for one as a formality, but you have now heard what I have to say on the topic.

I must also mention that Blogger's system of displaying posts doesn't exactly suit me. The reverse chronology is somewhat useful, in that any new posts are easily accessible to subscribers who have already read the whole of the blog. But what if certain posts would serve as better introductions to the blog than the newest ones? In order to keep my welcome post and other orienting information about my blog easily accessible, I've decided I will change the posting years for that handful of posts (because I have that strange time-traveling ability thanks to Blogger). I will include information about each post's truthful publication at the beginning of the post, and the displayed month and date at the bottom of each post will remain accurate, though even that reference point, that concept of accuracy, shifts, e.g. if the author adds content or edits pieces of the post at a later date. *Update, I've decided this is too much of a hassle and too strange. I will simply have the one post for guidance as an introduction to the blog, and I hope it is a a helpful post.

Another way I wish to modify Blogger's system of newest posts displayed first, with old posts obscured and drowned out by newer ones, is to provide one of those prioritized, welcoming posts I just mentioned, in which I direct readers to posts on different subjects. I'd like to set up something, perhaps series, that connects posts on related topics. I have few ideas for such series, such as one on design and another on home, or one on re-wilding and one on animism & ecumenism, but I'll have to postpone creating the introductory post for all the different series until I have some actual material to guide anyone toward. Actually, I am particularly excited to create a series of permaculture lessons (that I mentioned never having gotten around to after I returned from Brasil three years ago) so maybe these series will emerge faster than expected. Just a taste of all I have planned. Stay tuned!

As for comments, please take full responsibility for the content you post. Why waste your time masquerading as someone else or attacking anyone on insubstantial grounds if your post will simply get deleted with rapidity? Comments that contain excessive foul language, violent threats, personal attacks, or even intellectual attacks based on insufficient grounds, will receive this kind of prompt attention and be removed permanently from the discussion. The intention is simple-- to promote active, engaged, and relevant conversation about the issues at hand, issues too often ignored as it is. If a comment distracts from this purpose, then it will vanish from the thread, as I explained already. Thank you for you consideration.

* I apologize, my own prank. This kind of wiki article in this kind of hooligans' wiki database, however, captures very well what it seems has come to be called wiki vandalism. If such pranks could be completely relegated to Uncyclopedia, Wikipedia might actually succeed in making physical encyclopedia libraries obsolete, and as such, succeed in a small act of environmental activism to save all those tomes from being produced, hence saving acres upon acres of forest. However, the essential feature of Wikipedia, its open editing format, prevents such impropriety from going extinct. So long as Wikipedia remains true to its intent, pranksters will always blindside readers, in the process employing plenty of vigilant Wikipedia content-checkers for the entire existence of the database. And so, in the near future, people will still require unchanging articles from traditional encyclopedias to cite in their research.