It’s my blog and I’ll post when I want to

Two posts in one afternoon. It feels like I’m breaking some sort of unwritten blog law. Maybe the blog police will come and get me. I wonder what blog prison is like. A myriad of unfinished sentences and…

Ah ha hahaha… I was going to say incomplete ideas. I guess that’s completed the idea now so the joke is dead.

I imagine that’s pretty much what most blogs actually contain anyway. I wrote an essay towards the end of my degree (that’s right – I wrote essays and I have a degree) that touched on the blog’s special place in modern society – where once people took a stand on a soap box and preached to a small crowd – we now sit at desks and type to a crowd of infinite potential. The internet is the new public sphere. The new black. It’s the vibe. It’s Mabo. I don’t actually expect an infinite crowd. Infinite may have been a slight exaggeration. Obviously there’s actually a finite number of people in the world. And and even more finite number of people with internet access. And again a more finite number of people who are likely to visit my page intentionally. The chances of anyone stumbling here by chance are similar to the chances of a million monkeys with typewriters entering the words – willows presbyterian blog – into a search engine. So pretty remote. But I digest(sic)* (I’m drinking milo). I also digress. I was talking about the public sphere and blogs. Back in the day of soap box forums people gathered in a public area to enter discourse on pressing social and political topics. The printing press and mass produced newspapers killed this facet of life. It was easier to get a message across through the pages of the paper than to beat dead your hoarse ((sic) again) voice. That’s almost the lamest pun ever – lamer still would have been to “beat dead your hoarse(sick)(sic) voice dead.” That almost works. By almost I mean it doesn’t work at all but it’s sort of clever. Anyway, the media killed the public sphere – but tried to retain an element of interactivity in the letters page. The internet, and blogging, has resuscitated the public sphere. Discourse is alive once again. It’s interesting to note the trend among major media outlets to include interactive blogs as part of their online product.

*(sic) is a tool writers use to make their reader aware that there’s a mistake in there(sic) text. Usually editors use it on a letters page to highlight the ignorance of certain contributors. It becomes slightly pertinent to this post to point out that at this point the letters page can not be considered the “public sphere” ultimately it’s privately controlled.