No dice, we're back

I’ve been bloguing for several months now, been giving the issue of bloguing a lot of thought and still haven’t managed to come across with the appropriated answer to question number one: what is it to blog?

In a way, I suppose that’s because bloguing is one of the most creative and individual experiments anyone can undertake in our day and Age. Above all, blogs are means to express creativeness, and creativeness is always an individual process, be it expressed in a team blog or not.

Even people who blog once a month, even people who blog for their close friends, relatives, or merely themselves; even people whose brains aren’t, how can I drop it, “creative”, people engage in a lonesome activity of creative imagination; blogs need content and it doesn’t come out of thin air.

Bloguing forces the bloguer to think on his own in order to get acceptance, recognition, from himself, others or both. There’s a dual dimension .at work in bloguing: individualism competes with a sense of belonging to a communion of shared interests, tastes, feelings, etc.

Bloguing can be highly addictive, which means that it might have a somehow distasteful impact in the lives of individuals; or, of course, quite the opposite.

There is also the minor consideration that bloguing can turn, well, frustrating, especially when you take it vainly enough and consequently desire a wider audience.

But Bloguing might just as well be a Revolution in the way citizens communicate.

It is of capital importance that we realise the overgrowing significance of Mediated communication in Western Societies. Where is it leading us, as citizens?

Increasingly, our communication time is spent more and more in front of a computer, managing our every day life needs and wishes from a keyboard. This fact alone means a radical change in what we are, not only as individuals, but also as Society.

It might be argued that communication has always been mediated, one way or the other. Take the example of mediated communication made flesh by Churches and clergymen, all over the World, and in almost all periods of Human existence, between Man and God.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that Church still plays the role of mediator and now it can do so via internet. It’s a mediation inside of a mediation, an example of where our future might be headed. In a broad sense, if you’d like it, a blue pill kind of reality, as pictured in The Matrix.

Already, there is talk of an on-line society, community, life. On-line life, can you believe it?

When I was a young lad, and this is not nostalgia, my grandfather used to take us boys into native Nature, give us rides in Wisdom and Chess, and teach us the pleasures of exquisite food. Among several other deliciously palatable things, such as drinking black coffee in long sips while enjoying the flavour of fresh ink from a newspaper. He thought us about men and women. He brought happiness, knowledge and the bug of reasoning to our young lives.

Anyway, I’ve developed across the years a very sceptical personality. I think that bloguing is great fun. It takes me places I’ve never been before. It makes feel good. Hell, I even meet people in real life that I’ve known previously from bloguing. And I like to publish my work, call me vain.

This brings me to the pointed edge of this no dice post. Good things are meant to last. Enlightenment was and is a good thing. To reclaim it is a different matter altogether. Not easy, but worthwhile. Meantime, sabotaging Arnie’s words, we’re back, and will modestly chip in.

PostScript – No dice is a reference to a character in one of Frank Gruber’s detective novels, in the series that features Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg.

Photo taken from here.