Saturday, May 24, 2014

You Won't Believe What These 10 Bloggers Said!


And a fine Saturday morning to you, dear readers. Does it seem like I have not been writing? Sadly, this is true - I've not been writing and I fear I may be suffering from an affliction of age perhaps or of aging, which I shall try to explain. (NOTE: There is no list of what bloggers said in this post, I'm utilizing a click-bait post headline.)

News and information storms the world from every outlet, being shared and repeated and misreported and re-oriented, invented and re-invented, magical mathematical formulas hoovering up every nano-bit of content for global distribution and personal consumption - each keystroke and image commingling like turbo-charged teenage desires,captured and stored and re-visited and re-distributed .... the digitization of civilization means there is room on some remote server for your great aunt's collection of googley-eyed potato chips she's been "crafting" since all her kids grew up and left, just as every troll-fired insult, every secret, every wrinkle in Fame's fabric are all residing in numerical notations in vast continents and seas of data.

It sort of reminds me of the old-style tourist trap stores, where endless shelves of unspectacular crap are crowded with artifacts which no one really wants or needs - a mundane proof of life.

And yet here in this odd store, one could discover the works of poets and philosophers, of heads of state and victims of those same states, history, geography, science ... both real and unreal ... and then there are the commentaries of folks who have access to this tsunami of details. 

Outright lies, theories and fantasies endure among the eternal flow of what your child did or did not do, what you ate or did not eat, what you heard or saw or imagined you heard or saw, among the steady rain of outrages and screeds of the Offended. Petty cruelties live alongside endearing tales of pure goodness.

I've discovered that though I am (in digital terms) an old practitioner of online writing, I prefer to wait until I've found something worth saying, worth writing down for all or none to see and read.

The brittle and bitter and the superfluous all bellow for attention. My fingers poised above the keyboard - but what could I say? Some aspect or trend or idea strides across the digital landscape and I ponder what (if any) insight such items offer. The result is that I may decide not to add to the negativity swirling overhead, or to proffer some heartwarming tidbit, or simply to be satisfied that some other person has made note of the event.

And being somewhat non-young, I move and think slower than the hotshot young gunmen and gunwomen who stomp out into the streets for high noon showdowns. 

And so this post has an ambiguous ending -- did anything change? Was some realization made? You will have to return here to find out ... and I will be here.




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