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18 June 2010

No more I love yous?

I continue, as a student once well versed in the powers of revision, to re-assess what blogging may actually lead to.
Normally it just "is".
One blogs.

However, a friend came to tea this week, one who's judgement is impeccable and whose analysis is to be valued. "This blog is making me dizzy", was the verdict and so one takes note.
The discussion lead to an interesting insight which is worth sharing here. My generation is no longer the hip one that blazed a trail through the conventions of the past. In fact, the past is now so passé one does not even, usually, bother to mention it. The eternal now of the Internet community makes news from even five minutes ago a bore.
However, my interlocutors at tea are not of this community. They scorn the Internet excesses and insist that bringing a treasured book to bed is the height of one's reading day. While it may not actually lead to blindness, reading online is a perversion to be avoided at all costs.

So who, I ask myself, am I blogging for?
My generation do not read blogs much. They are afraid of Facebook and they play golf or join a gym rather than sit and write. This is a wild generalisation, perhaps, but one based on defending blogs at noisy dinner parties, trying to explain how clicking has taken over from linear print, showing (patiently and to people who are on the verge of yawning with boredom) that dutoning is the "new black" and is worth trying out on photos.
I, on the other hand, see blogging as part of the new poetics. There was a strange radio programme about poetry yesterday where Andrew Motion spoke, annoyingly enough, about the poet's trade. I listened carefully to the argument about how poetry uses "I" a lot. So does blogging.
Ergo, blogging is a form of poetry?

No wonder my friends look so tired...