In yesterday’s Observer Review, Robert McCrum was trying to evaluate the effect that the last decade has had on the world of books. Whether broadcast media and new forms of technology have hindered the progression of literature, or whether they have improved the written word.
Of course, the internet has to be at the heart of this discussion. And an apparently true statistic that I have seen banded around numerous times is that 175,000 new ‘blogs’ are launched everyday – which equates to around two new blogs per second.
In the time I write this post there will be hundreds of new blogs scattered across the internet. Whether they will be any good or beneficial to our children and our children’s children, well that’s another matter.
While many will point to the deteriorating grammar that now litters the internet (the endless LOLz!!! and text speak) as a detrimental effect on the written word, this new age of self-expression is something that I find very exciting.
This ‘blog’ is something I do in my spare time for around 10 minutes a day because throughout any given day there are thoughts that you want to share with the world. And ideas that you don’t want to lose. In ten years time I don’t suppose anybody is going to care about my commentary on culture, books, film, music or sports or any of that jazz, nor should they, but self-expression is important for every one of us – and for me blogs help me from talking shit in every day life.
It’s been a pretty strange experience at times having this website. I say this because whenever I write I don’t think about anybody reading this. I don’t expect any feedback and, to be honest, I don’t write for other people (that might sound weird seeing as I publish it all on the internet). I’m always writing for myself.
Recently I’ve had people talk to me in public about the things I’ve wrote on here, and I’m always taken back at first like “you actually read that?” or “how do you find it?” when in actual fact I know that anybody googling my name is likely to land here. More recently than that my girlfriend told me that her mum was on here have a mosey around.
This month alone I have had 1,206 visitors here on the website. That’s 1,206 unique people who have found their way here. And it’s been consistently over 1,000 per month since the turn of the year. It’s bizarre to think that that many people ending up here reading about my every day commentary on pop culture, or my uni experience, or family, or whatever it is I’m writing about. Why they should care I don’t know, but I guess whatever form of self-expression you want to pursue there are always going to be people around who will be interested in it.
I’ve kind of lost focus on what I wanted to say with this, but I guess it goes along the lines of ‘blogs are brilliant’. While the internet came around as a communications medium, what has developed has been a gold mine of educational and personal development. Whether people sift through wikipedia and google aimlessly, or whether they try to find themselves once a week by publishing their own thoughts, its something that is hugely beneficial to the human race.
But I guess the next generation of young adults will be best suited to comment in a decade or so’s time.
Entries (RSS)