What is a Blog?

October 25, 2010 by
Filed under: Education Matters, Social Brain 

It’s a means of thinking out loud.

A way to surprise oneself.

Sometimes a commitment device.

A way of engaging friendly strangers.

And thereby creating  strange friends.

It’s an invitation to others

to come hither and share in our best guesses.

A pretext for the excitement of hyperlinking.

A pretence at poetry.

An attention seeking device.

Actually it’s a waste of time.

At least this one is.

But as Bertrand Russell once said,

time wasted enjoying oneself,

is never time wasted.

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Comments

  • Susan Greenberg

    It’s a protean form, that can become anything (though my students all think it is another word for a diary)

    • Anonymous

      Thanks Susan. A Protean form is an elegant way to capture the flexibility of the blog. Proteus was always on the run, and changed form to evade capture. Maybe blogs are similar in that they are tentative by nature, capable of being revised, edited or deleted. In passing, the book ‘The Protean Self’ by Ray Lifton is well worth a read. (http://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmentation/dp/0226480984)

  • Susan Greenberg

    It’s a protean form, that can become anything (though my students all think it is another word for a diary)

    • Anonymous

      Thanks Susan. A Protean form is an elegant way to capture the flexibility of the blog. Proteus was always on the run, and changed form to evade capture. Maybe blogs are similar in that they are tentative by nature, capable of being revised, edited or deleted. In passing, the book ‘The Protean Self’ by Ray Lifton is well worth a read. (http://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmentation/dp/0226480984)

  • Stephen Feber

    It’s less intimate than a diary, more private than an essay. A good blog should be an invitation to an intelligent conversation – as I get older few things are as exciting as good ideas freely shared and the blog world can be such a sharing space.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks Stephen. ‘An invitation to an intelligent conversation’ sounds like the right aspiration, though reading the comments on ‘Comment is Free’ on the Guardian website sometimes makes me wonder if blogs invite all the wrong kinds of conversation.

  • Stephen Feber

    It’s less intimate than a diary, more private than an essay. A good blog should be an invitation to an intelligent conversation – as I get older few things are as exciting as good ideas freely shared and the blog world can be such a sharing space.

    • Anonymous

      Thanks Stephen. ‘An invitation to an intelligent conversation’ sounds like the right aspiration, though reading the comments on ‘Comment is Free’ on the Guardian website sometimes makes me wonder if blogs invite all the wrong kinds of conversation.