Another blog? How 2008 can you be?

I’ve started a blog. You are reading it. I have no good reasons, just selfish ones.

Blogs are an ultimate expression of the current “me” generation. And let there be no doubt, Gen-X, Y, and Millennials are definitely me-centric generations. Just look at all the reality TV we consume and and generate! If Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, and that awful show about child beauty pageants doesn’t convince you alone, I don’t know what will.

Blogs are widely hailed as democratizers of content and news, which they are to an extent. But they are also the most inward-facing publications available. Consider that a blogger can publish their unhinged views on the most widely accessible distribution medium ever created, and face no retribution for it. Publishing a blog is cheap (or free) and no advertising or other financial support is needed to keep our drivel flowing.

Comment threads on blogs are quilting parties where innuendo becomes fact and is redistributed to the greater like-minded audience. Eventually, enough believers in the fabrication make it irrevocably a part of the conversation about that subject, and the damage to reality is done.

Whether bloggers gather comments or not, interact with readers or not, they are free to write from a platform of piety and belief without the yucky necessity of conversation and discourse. Bloggers (and increasingly everyone else apparently) feel no pressure to compromise, accept, learn, or otherwise adjust their opinions when presented with equal or better evidence and arguments to the contrary.

Our world is changing, as it always has been
I will not be one of those people who laments “things used to be different.” First of all, of course things used to be different! That was then, this is now.

Second: what makes the world different now is not that more people disagree, or that more people disrespect eachother, or that more people are teabaggers or commie socialists… What’s different is that we are aware of it! Thanks to the intarwebs.

The cheap distribution of information and opinions has simply unlocked all the crazy that’s always been out there. We’re just now realizing it, that’s all. And as with any market filled with cheap product, this one is absolutely full to the brim with crap products.

So why would I add to it? Ego? Entitlement? A sense that the world will benefit from my valuable insights? Maybe.

It's all about Me
But I think most of all, I want to keep a record of my observations for myself. And any time one is collecting content, they may as well put it on the market and see if there is any value in it for others.
I look at it this way in my, perhaps, fabricated imagination: Our sewage flows to a treatment plant where it then enters a settling tank. In that tank, the liquid and solid matter stratifies into a vast pile of thick stuff at the bottom 50% of the tank. On top of that, another 48% of fairly murky thinner liquid. And then on top of that, 2% of clearish stuff that one might consider drinking if offered a million bucks.

Well, maybe not.

Anyway, I’ve set my ambitions low. I want to be somewhere in the middle 48% band, but close to the $1mm/sip stuff. I will endeavor not to let you, or myself, down.