Mad Musings

So what is a blogger, and what is this blogging thing all about? In many ways the blog is an extension of traditions of the seventeenth century diarist. Certainly, Samuel Pepys, were he alive today, would have been a blogger. But blogs are more than personal diaries. They are also commentaries on the modern world and bloggers tend to be more computer literare than your average internet peruser.

This means that bloggers (and I include myself in this analysis) tend to be a self-selected group of 'technorati' and in this respect we are the true inheritors of the tradition Samuel Pepys (who was after all a member of both the intelligensia and the technorati of his day). He was also a gourmand &2014; which is an appealing aspect of his nature as far as I'm concerned.

There is another similarity with the diarist's behavoiour as well. In that the diarist has a very personal relationship between the brain, the pen and the page. You may not think that the blogger considers the world this way, after all it's a mass medium, capable of potentially reaching millions. Yet, if you think about it blogging can be an intensely personal experience. After all what you're facing is a screen on which the words your type appear instantaneously. This can be an intensely personal experience between yourself, the keybord and the screen. None of the potential readers out there truly matter; especially if you can type at a reasonable rate and know HTML then the words on the screen can flow almost as smoothly as they would from a pen.

As a wordsmith of sorts (if you don't believe me, then check my poetry site this can be a liberating experience. Especially as I was once a magazine editor and it's been ingrained into me that words should be correctly applied and typeset appropriately. As such it's fairly amazing that I can even write anything this 'freeform' without obsessing about every word and editing and then re-editing the copy.

But that is the nature of this new medium or ours, where the diarist, the editor and the newshound meet and coalesce in this experience known as a 'blog'.