Why blog? Why not?

I'm not up on the blogosphere much. I don't follow any blogs. Occasionally someone will link to a blog post on facebook and I'll read it, but that's about it.

So why blog? And why now?

I see the world being compressed more and more into bite-sized nuggets of information. The advances in communications technology mean that everyone has access to just about all information. As such, our attention spans are getting shorter as we jump from interesting thing to interesting thing (to cat video). Our interpersonal communications follow the same trend. A prime example of this is twitter and tumblr (and other sites that I have never tried). It seems we are taking facebook and compressing it into just the news feed and even further into just 140 characters.

I believe we are losing an important piece of the beauty of the internet: that we can learn from each other and grow through exposure to other ideas.

We generally only "follow" those who we know or those who we agree with. If we do "follow" someone we don't agree with it is often only to argue with them, to bicker in 140-character snippets that don't offer real insight into our positions. No hearts and minds are changed, no mutual understanding is reached, and very little respect is given to those who have different opinions.

Is blogging the answer to this problem? Possibly. Currently I have decided to make a go of it being MY answer to this problem. I have tried twitter and tumblr; I don't see the appeal. Entertaining, yes, but not as entertaining as a good book, movie, or video game (certainly not as entertaining as a good board game!). I have become disillusioned with facebook. Somewhat useful, but it seems to be increasingly rare that I am actually connecting with people instead of just voyeuristically enjoying their lives.

There are other reasons I am starting a blog now, which I don't believe I will go into at the moment. It is enough for you to know that I see good reasons for blogging, one of which is the reason I outlined above. I hope you gain some benefit from reading this blog, though what that is I don't quite know. Some of my reasons for doing this are more for my own benefit, I may go into that later on. Meanwhile, thank you for reading!