Over the last few years, my view of the emergence of the blog has oscillated between 2 tenuous viewpoints:
1. The blog, an embarrassingly meaningless 21st century development where hours are spent indoors sitting next to our computers spewing trivial words, pictures, recipes, and thoughts into an endless cyberspace desperately pretending that it is gives our mechanical and unnatural lives purpose.
Vs.
2. The blog, the human reaction to this increasingly integrated and interconnected world that is the savior of the increasingly lost souls confused and diluted in an alarmingly quick moving and changing environment. The blog, a new and easy direct connection between reader and writer, where anyone can publish art, give witness accounts of events largely unobstructed by the media (as we have seen with Iran), and be heard directly based on their own merit - creating an anarchic but relatively egalitarian playing field to anyone who wishes to participate. A medium of genuine human expression like a blade of grass creeping up through the cracks of cement sidewalks and roads.
Today, as I have found the motivation to make my first blog entry, I subscribe to this second viewpoint. Tomorrow, I might be kicking myself for submitting to the virtual insanity, but what is more human than second-guessing?
So here it is: As a person who has for the last 2 years spent half his time in the mountain village of Chamonix France, and the other half in Montreal and Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, this confusion in writing a blog is well founded. This blog addressed by "reallyhateblogs" is yet another extension of the growing uncertainty - something that will either help solve the problem once and for all, or will further reinforce it. At the very least, it is a lesson and a story worth sharing... I think.
So to everyone I know thinking "What the hell is this guy doing writing another blog about nothing," I say chill out, for what is any art or story but another expression about nothing. In the stone ages they drew circles on rocks, Beethoven had his symphonies, we have our blogs. So while tomorrow I may be agreeing with you, for now, let me indulge.
JL
