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FOR THOSE ABOUT TO BLOG WE SALUTE YOU
With our addiction to fossil fuels we're heating things up for future generations and turning lovely Mother Earth into a happy-slapping crack whore, argues Torrey Meeks. And who are we to deny it?
by Torrey Meeks
Rock and roll won't save the world. Traditional culture is a one track locomotive chugging towards oblivion. But blogging just might.
For those about to blog: We salute you.
In an age where the free market of ideas has become constrained, commercialized, and endlessly co-opted in a no-holds barred game of corporate one-upsmanship, the masses are finding liberation using the same products we're told we need, over and over again. Rather, in the by-products of the products.
Blogging is an inevitable outgrowth of 300-baud bulletin board systems run from Commodore 64's geared for games and word processing in the 80's. It's the collective outcry of the trapped, the bored, the marginally talented, the extremely talented, the shy, the baroque; it's home to a quicksilver lexicon, the rapid fire transition in thought and opinion of the marginalized that has gained instant mass. It's a no-strings-attached sub-culture soapbox.
That's not to say it's always a good thing. Sub-culture can be ugly. It's linked up unsavory slices of humanity and streamlined them. They've grown more cunning and creative, but then, so has everyone else. I'll take a few dead-ends here and there and earn a few cerebral scars along the way to get to the good stuff. I'd rather be intellectually challenged by a nobody with a couple posts and no readership on a MySpace account, than crapped on by an influential somebody with nothing to say on network news. Bill O'Reilly comes to mind.
Here's the thing: If you feed people crap long enough they get tired of the way it tastes. You can get used to the smell, the texture, maybe its looks. But you never get used to eating shit. There's an explosion of ideas going on as people are connected faster and faster on a global scale. We're discovering that the words and letters and ink of an Iranian don't look that much different than our ink. Their thoughts and dreams and ambitions aren't that different than ours. Take someone in Red China with an "I ate this" today blog and stack them up against a twelve year old in Canada with an "I talked to him" today and you know what you've got? A world village, one where the way a person looks isn't as important as what they have to say.
I'm not going to strike a ridiculous pose here and claim blogs herald the end of racism, but they just might make it more scarce than Christina Aguilera trying to pose on a pole in twenty years.
People have flocked to blog revolution for the same reason men went West: It's new, it's lawless, it's big, it's free. Enforcement is tenuous at best, non-existent at worst, and that's a good thing. There is no one here who will tell you what to think or how to think, and only the poorly aimed and executed pop up ads and banner promotions tell you what might be cool. Contrary to normal life, where only the sanctioned outlets of opinion and style reign, the 'net, and blogs, are changing the definition of 'mainstream'. It's the electronic equivalent of bio-diversity, and it works. We're getting stronger. As in real life, the most potent and untapped form of consumer savvy is word-of-mouth, and no one's got a handle on that.
<About the author
Torrey Meeks lives to write and writes to live. He also writes to pay the bills and to buy the gas for his motorbike.Read his American Newswire column
