Word Stack or A Pile of Thoughts

I attended a lecture yesterday by Ian Casocot, concerning blogs and their impact on literary activity.  The byline of the talk was "Exploding the Frontiers of Literature", which I thought was rather agreeable, because if anything has been able to capture the slough of humanity, both garbage and gold, it’s the collective of personal blogs in cyberspace.  It’s like one of the ultimate dreams of humanism as ideology, that every person be afforded the same space for expression and the equal opportunity to be heard. 

Ideologies aside, I think that’s a great thing, that no matter who a person is or what that person is writing about, the material is out there, side-by-side with everyone else’s.  It’s freedom, it’s expression,

But there is also a disturbing, political trend that is creeping into the blogosphere.  I can smell it, and I think that its a threat to the freedom of the blogger.  In the real world, we tend to categorize people in terms of a certain hierarchy, levels of and classes, stereotypes.  It’s immediately assumed that if x person is from y place, then x person is likely to be z type personality.

The same is becoming (or already has become) true for blogs.  If I blog on Friendster, I’m assumed to be writing angsty teenage self-absorbed rants; if I were on Blogspot, I’d be much more mature and intellectual. 

This sort of thing can probably be proven statistically; but so what?  The individual is not a statistic.  And it doesn’t make logical sense to assume that a blogger is less interesting because they’re on a particular blog page rather than another.

I could publish my blog on Blogspot or Wordpress, and advertise myself to the world as part of that inner circle, that clique of sophisticates (whether that empirically exists or not).  But no, I’m staying here, on Friendster, together with the angsty teenagers and love-sick preteens (whether there’s any validity to that claim or not). 

My blog is my performance space, and judge me not by where I put that space, but rather what I express on it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.