Why Blog?

Like David Bullard, I've come to the realisation that I can't afford to blog. My life is severely out of whack, not necessarily because of blogging, but blogging certainly hasn't helped. So I've done some thinking on the highway - not the information highway - the highway highway, and I'm pretty clear on a few changes I'd like to make.

This weekend quite a few people commented on the fact that I've lost weight and am looking good, and you know, that gives me a much greater kick than I get from blogging. I would much rather see my weight go down to 80kg than see my blogs hits break 100 000, or make the top 10 on some blog ranking. Honestly. I started blogging actually simply to record, share and inspire (myself and others) about my progress in triathlon, and specifically Ironman. Blogging has since served other functions, namely to promote my writing and photography, and to communicate some of my concerns regarding the conundrums our world faces. It is a place those who know me come to see what I've been doing, what's happening in South Africa and in my world, but to the extent that it's just been reflecting news, it's been squeezing out some of the original ethos.

Realistically, I'm not sure if I have managed to convert many people to care about what is happening and where we're headed - those who visit my blog regularly were converted long ago. And it's tiresome preaching to the converted. I would rather make this space about what we can do, who we can be, than endlessly addressing concerns to a world out there that's still not ready to listen (this may change when that changes.) An awesome blog that addresses Peak Oil issues, is here. I'm going to rededicate this blog to showcasing some of the writing and photography projects I'm busy with. Right now there are a few exciting ones, and some I can't talk about right now, but there are some big projects hanging in the balance, including TV, including some big names. So potentially very exciting.

N is for Nature. Not news. I've also grown tired critiquing the media, and want to now move away from that entirely. This blog was never started as a news and politics blog, and I've never wanted it to be that either. That doesn't mean I am gagging myself, it simply means I'm going to pay less attention to it. The news media as far as I'm concerned, is like the Joker, in Batman. It's witty, it's entertaining, sometimes fresh and interesting, sometimes it shows a bit of pazzazz, even muscle, but essentially we don't need to consume nearly as much as we are - it's a distraction from what we ought to be doing. It is also seldom what it was designed to be: a public service.

News now is entirely what the reader chooses to focus on. You can Google your way to the sort of news you want, irrespective of whether it reflects astute reporting or not. I discovered that even when I started reading the so-called best journalism, from the likes of the Guardian and Financial Times, the news didn't really give me anything to work with. Even the 'best' news, is still really a particular view from within a particular context. A lot of it is flawed, and patently unsophisticated. The majority of news doesn't offer any coherent insights, it simply tells us what is happening, and we hear the same thing repeated on TV, radio, online and in the newspaper. It's not very meaningful or useful. We never hear the answer to: why? We simply get fed what on and on and on.

This weekend for example, I didn't read either a Saturday paper or a Sunday paper, and I am beginning to feel that it's healthier to limit the amount of information - especially what is labelled 'news' - that we allow into our heads. How much is really relevant to our lives? And what do we learn from the stuff that is?

Also, I used to think that blogs can provide an important function to build networks and communities. Sure, they can. They seldom do, and when they do, it's seldom meaningful. That I predict will change, and quite soon. I hope so. I think I have met one person through my blog. We are far better served to get up from our computers and go to the gym, and work on our bodies, our health, our relationships with others, than to surf around 'cyberspace' any more than we really have to. Clicking a mouse pad does little to change the world, or our own circumstances.

What does this mean? Less blogging. I might skip two or three days in a week (hopefully more). I'm going to be focusing more of my time on being in the gym, and out on the bike. I weigh 83kg now and I want to get that number under 80kg. Blogging tends to eat into time I might otherwise be dedicating to sweating, to moving, to FUN! I will be doing a weekly column in the style of James Kunstler's Clusterfuck Chronicles every Monday, called The View From My Bicycle. It's not necessarily about cycling either. I also intend to dedicate at least one day a week to discussing either Nature, Virtue, Discipline or Logic. There will also be more personal material, but obviously not to the extent that it violates anyone's privacy (including my own).

My original idea was to ease down on blogging once I reached 100 000, but I'd like to moderate my effort from now on instead. For those who visit my blog regularly, I'd also like to encourage you to get out into the sunshine, move your body, and enjoy the gift of living. I saw an animal today with the lower half of his body paralysed, and really, facing the creep of death. We have much to be grateful for, and I don't believe the internet is the place to celebrate that.

Blogging is like Marriage, and why I still have a bone to pick with Lynne Slettevold

Marriage is a public institution. You and your beloved make your feelings known publicly. Part of the reason is so the public knows what you've decided to be, and that knowing this, they can respect you and your beloved's decision. Naturally, while these may be the overt intentions, it is expecting an awful lot from both society and one's beloved to behave honorably ad infinitum, forsaking all others until death us do part, forever and ever amen. What that means is can we rely on our partners (blogs) to be faithful to us, and can we rely on the public not to interfere into what ought to be certain private places in our public enterprises that are, shall we say, relatively off-limits (eve if just off the beaten track), or else - and worse, ought we to expect the public and the media to commit adultery with our beloved? Of course not.

No reasonable and rational public or public entity would dare to operate in a way to fly in the face of public decency. Or...else...? Interestingly, there is even a Divorce Act which rightly protects the interests of both parties (including from one another) but also from media intrusion. Note this is post marriage. Sunday Times went to court recently to challenge this law, citing a right to publish and the public’s to receive information[on parties going through a divorce]. Whether the Sunday Times won their challenge, I'm not sure. After all, even Billy Gundelfinger has stated:

“For me, the mechanism for protecting the identity of the parties should be maintained, if only to serve the interests of children,” said Gundelfinger. “In my experience it is not at all rare that children are harmed in divorce actions, and would suffer irreparable harm if their identities were made known.”

Billy Gundelfinger said he feared a return to the practice of some newspapers in the ’70s – before the introduction of the law — in which “whole pages” were devoted to a round-up of divorce cases, including “all the gory details”.

Here is an interesting case where the media, pleading for the law to keep step with the 'changing values of society' is asking for the right to make public confidential and sensitive information pertaining to private family information in particularly trying circumstances. To test whether this is something that should be allowed, simply ask: if you were getting divorced, would you like the newspapers to cover it, including what your partner thinks and feels about you? But everyone knows how protective and controlling the media is of bloggers reporting on their own/internal and thus sensitive corporate information. Isn't this a double standard? Once again, in terms of the law, and how it applies to blogs and all the sensitivities involved, there ought to be a simple application and observance of logic, common law common sense, and ordinary manners.

What I am saying essentially is that while blogs operate in the public domain, so do marriages, and in an obvious and ordinary sense, ordinary rules of decency apply. So, for example, if a blogger makes a mistake at work (or even if he/she doesn't), or if a blogger aims to make a case against an aggrieving party, to what extent is handpicked content from the complainants blog relevant in the aggrieved party's rebuttal? To what extent is the public's right to what happens in a marriage/divorce relevant to ordinary work/civil processes, even if it is ostenibly a relationship concluded in the publid domain? In fact personal details do not belong to one's colleagues, one's boss...except as a useful means to smear and besmirch? Is that where the exception is allowed? The answer is, blogs are probably not very relevant until they say something that is of and in itself relevant.

But recent history has shown that those outsiders (managers/bosses, people in positions of authority) who want to use blogs against their blogging owners have been allowed free reign to do so. This is likely to change, as ordinary common laws come to into play, and as these situations arise more and more frequently. Because what seems to some to be very fuzzy math is actually about plain old good and decent manners at the end of the day.

So am I wrong to mention someone who has displayed bad manners? It depends how honestly/maliciously I make that representation. What are my underlying intentions. And I think the impact of the communication has to be balanced against the injury experienced. Lynne Slettevold is an example, and I'd like to re-address that experience here, because it's relevant.

Imagine you are climbing a mountain. A high mountain, not just any mountain. You and your guide agree that when you get to the top, your guide will take a photo of you, to prove you have climbed the mountain. You have many important reasons for climbing the mountain, but part of the reason to do it is to have testimony, evidence, of your achievement. Perhaps you need to prove to the world you reached the top in order that other climbers who wish to do the same will pay for your services. Except when you come back down the mountain, your guide, inexplicably refuses to hand over the photographic evidence. Thus to a large extent, the great costs, the various resources employed in this very laborious expedition, all the ambitions behind the project, are to a large extent effectively laid to waste.

The mountain in this analogy is code for a Photo Exhibition I held. It's a case of unrepentant and unacceptable bad manners. But that's all it is. Tomorrow there's a post about fitness, the next day about good food, the next about insomnia. Life goes on, and of course if Lynne felt so terrible about whatever she did, she could call me up at any time and say, here's what we agreed. Then I would naturally feel - wow, now what I said in the past no longer applies. Except that that hasn't happened, and so what I said does apply.: Someone didn't do something they were supposed to do. Boo hoo. End of story. But if I were to expand on that and start to violate her right to privacy (where she lives, where she works, placing photos of her on the net, describing my skewed insights into her private light) then suddenly the ultimate perpetrator of bad manners is me. And I think that is easy to see.

I think as a blogger one also has to walk the fine line between addressing things and venting. I once vented over a cyclist, B, and although I remain really pissed off about what happened that day (during a 180km cycle race), I didn't realise she would read the vent herself. But then I didn't write it necessarily for anyone to read. In a sense it was like a diary entry, because for goodness sake, if 50% of your readers are from the UK, and the USA, and your South African visitors are 50% random, and those who aren't aren't interested in cycling, then it's not even going to be boo hoo to them. But if no one is going to read this super-personal stuff, why blog it? Why indeed. So in that particular case I don't think there was much point. All I achieved was to actually worsen the situation, which was not my intention, although I don't feel like I had any malicious intent other than to express my misery and misfortune in a bicycle race. The end certainly didn't justify the means, but having clearly expressed my pain and heartache, I also learned subsequently the extent of her lack of remorse. Eeek. Stop writing about this!

Anyone can apply the basic model and moral of fairness and manners to the internet (and to the media) in order to test whether our use of information is warranted, in the public interest - truly - or simply bad manners to whatever end.

Blogs are going to be up for grabs and up for scrutiny a lot more going into the future, and probably will initially lose 'challenges' against them. But blogs and bloggers are becoming more powerful every day, and even if sanity does not prevail, perhaps the cyber-lynching sensibilities of the blogging masses will.

6 Minutes with Donald Duck (VIDEO)

Donald Duck and Chip and Dale - All in a Nutshell Episode - The funniest videos are a click away

What's The Point Of A Blog?

A blog is a chance to get a detailed behind the scenes picture of your favorite writer, celebrity or normal person. It's more detailed orientated than Facebook, it's more personal than email. In my case, when I have stuff appearing in publications, it can be viewed first here, with bonus footage/content. Also, while we may be used to a one-way flow of data (from a page through our eyes into our brains), a blog allows the opportunity for the reader to respond. Increasingly, you might find a curious detail and want the writer to expand on it. Or, as is often the case, you want to show/tell the writer that you are more intelligent than he/she is.

I started to appreciate the power and usefulness and thrill of blogging while living in Broadband Heaven - South Korea. I had read what I thought was a rare and astutely insightful book (The Long Emergency - by Jim Kunstler)and then was referred in the epilogue to his blog (www.kunstler.com). It's not the best design, but he writes well, has in the millions of visitors and it was fascinating following his commentary on events (updated daily and a column weekly), and seeing how predictions and reality became increasingly congruent. I have also emailed the author a few times and received several interesting responses, which is something you could never do until modern times. The same thing occurred with Weston DeWalt, author of The Climb, who actually contacted me via reading my blog.

It is amazing that we have the capacity now to read one another's minds, and for one person to infiltrate millions of minds, and for those millions (I almost said 'minions') to respond en masse. Kunstler says he wades through masses of emails each day.

The point of a blog, for me, in the beginning, was to provide a place for those people who wanted to get in touch with me, to visit (instead of sending group mails and getting 5 irritated responses each time). I am still shocked, surprised, awed, weary of the fact that what is published on the web can be read by a little girl on a computer in Australia, or a hairy nosed scientist at the North Pole, and everywhere in between.

I only worry that few of us take this technology seriously. So much - the majority by far - of what enters the public consciousness is drivel. And drivel begets drivel. Drivel and our fascination with drivel (rather than what is necessary) is what has driven us to where we are as a civilisation, and we know it is not a safe, happy, sustainable or even sane place. Blogs - if enough people experience a koo koo moment - may be able to reverse this effect, this mental malaise. Change begins with a change in mindset, and blogs can do, I believe, plenty to shift the zeitgeist to a more meaningful level of functionality.

Why Blog?

Right now, the 4th 'Most Popular' blog on Amatomu's aggregator is Hot Gossip.
In the Life column, there's the following feature: Hello, my name is Tertia and I am a whiner.
The 11th most popular News and Politics blog is Poes.com, with posts by a chap called Masterbeer. Charming.

Do I really want to be associated with such mindless drivel?

If all was well with the world, perhaps being drivel (driven) to such purile destraction would be entertaining, even funny. Given some of the urgent issues of this era, it's fair to describe our attention spans as suffering from schizophrenia, AAD, and general craziness.

But then I return to something a colleague said: "We're fucked. But why worry, when it's so obvious just how totally fucked we all are."

Ok then: Why worry? Why blog?

Even more worrying is that the top content of this blog is some of the most inane stuff possible. In first position is a Rugby World Cup joke, 2nd is a description for a sex position, then something on a serial killer. People don't apparently care about what's worth caring about. The internet unfortunately proves what the state of our collective mindrot is. So if I put 75% of intelligent constructive content up on this site, but the masses gravitate to the fraction that is negative ranting, or otherwise titillating garbage, am not essentially reinforcing the cycle of mental vacuousness? Sadly, this apparently hopeless malaise once again confirms why our species is due for a massive KLAP.

Here's the top content for this site, measured for the last 3 months. Sad, but true.
1. 2007/10/van-at-rugby-world-cup-joke.html
2. /2007/10/italian-chandelier.html
3. /2007/10/chaval-caveman-cometh-pictures.html
4. /2007/10/chabal-human-wrecking-ball-video.html
5. /2007/10/mask-tv.html
6. /2007/10/worlds-worst-serial-killer-richard.html
7. /2007/10/radiohead-releases-in-rainbows-free.html
8. /2007/10/gee-die-bal-vir-bryan-habana-music.html
9. /2007/10/nz-choker-picture.html
10. /2007/10/report-rotten-neighbors-at-rotten.html

So why bother blogging at all?