Blah Blah Blog

When the British Women’s Group asked me to make available my writings on their website the simplest way to do it was to use a blog. I wasn’t interested in the blogging trend but it was an easy way to grant access to my articles. I am now more rabidly than ever not interested in the phenomenon but it did give me another subject for one of these articles.

I don’t want to bore you with detail of the history of blogging, but in brief, the term is said to have come in 1997 from the merging of “website” and “logging”. In 1999 the term was shortened to “blog” and in 2004 it officially entered the language as both a noun and a verb.

That aside, a blog is an easy way for the more dim-witted among society to load information onto a special kind of website. Companies use them to publish up to date - often daily- information about themselves although this ‘copy’ might be prepared by the PR department, rather than the CEO whose name appears at the top of the blog.

The general public use them as diaries or journals… Diaries are great. I don’t doubt their uses: for personal posterity, for therapy, as a means to remember a particularly eventful passage in one’s life, but mostly I believe they should remain private.

Blogging has enabled the general public to reveal their innermost secrets to the world and so the dumbing down, already rife in our society, continues its downward spiral.

I did my homework before I decided where to put my own articles, hunting around the different blogging companies to see what they offered. I nearly abandoned my intention to post my own articles because of what I found.

There is a genuine use for people who live apart from the majority of family and friends. Their posts are a cyber letter about their lives for their families but I have to ask, why are they open for public consumption? Why are comments activated so that complete strangers can make contact? Your baby growing its first tooth is probably something only parents, aunties and grandparents should be cooing over. Believe me, we’re not interested.

It’s not just babies and their bowel movements either. Some people are blogging about their pets (yes, and their bodily fluids too) their knitting projects, their vegetable gardens, alcohol intake, their weight loss. I could go on.

The self indulgence and self worshipping of some people is astonishing. Do they honestly think we might be interested in the trivial details of their lives? Is it about authenticity? Do they feel the need for validation? Do they feel more real, more important, more something else because they put their opinions out in the public domain?

Even more worrying is that these banal blogs have readers… How sad and lonely we’ve become sitting in front of our PCs. Why aren’t the bloggers and the readers going out and talking to their friends and neighbours? We’re losing social skills, losing the ability to communicate. Some of the blogs I came across think in terms of relationships, friendships with the people at the other end of their PCs. It’s tragic. Relationships are so much more complex than written words on a screen.

It’s not just that it’s dull; so much of what is written is illiterate and riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. It’s like virtual landfill. At some point an environmental movement will arise asking what the politicians are going to do with all the dross in cyberspace. It’s not decomposing; it’s getting bigger and bigger, each and every second by the Petabyte.

Andy Warhol was correct in his prediction of Joe Public getting their fame for fifteen minutes. Sadly, the fifteen minutes seems to be going on and on interminably.