1 post tagged “rambling misanthropy first post internet misgivings meta-blogging”

My new year’s resolution for 2007 was to start the blog you are now reading. This seemed like a fittingly low bar to set, the sort of resolution that’s eminently achievable, yet still something I would never get around to without the artificial inducement of another revolution of the earth about the sun.

Now that it’s actually come to writing this ever-so-important first post, I find myself at a bit of a loss. In the early days of the internet, we used to dream of what’s now been rather unfortunately named the ‘blogosphere’ (Noosphere was much better).  Over cathode rays and pizza we’d wax poetic about: “the next Gutenberg press, man! It’s like more important than movable type!”. I’d go to bed with visions of synaesthesia alight in my head, and explore the whole-earth-‘lectronic-link and other such precursors to the new status quo. It wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of Datapac and BBSs.

Empowering the everyman with the ability to publish seemed like a noble pursuit once upon a time, but seeing what most everymen have to say has made me more than a little reluctant to add my voice to the off-key choir of the tiny fragment of humanity who can afford broadband rather than a book. I just don’t feel the need to inform the world that I had a nice new-years, and sun-dried tomato sausages with moutard a l’ancienne for dinner. Nor do I want to indulge in grandstanding and fakery, sublimating a toxic personality into a thick vapour of altruistic sentiment.

My renewed hope for blogging came from a conversation with a podcasting friend who’s become a big fish in our small Montreal pond, and the observation that “Yes, the vast majority of social media is crap, but so is the vast majority of everything else”. There is hope for the internet 2.0, I think, provided we can keep it from falling into the usual suspect's hands, and stumbling down a road to hell paved with the most grandiose of good intentions.

Welcome to the first of what will hopefully become a long series of postings from a pedant, thoughts of a technologist, and musings from a mildly misanthropic mammal.

Happy New Year, may 2008 make all your dreams and fantasies come true!