It’s partly my fault (or to my credit) that ***Dave has a blog. It’s fun for me to read, because since he’s started, he’s managed to cover a couple of topics that I myself have meant to cover and forgotten about.
We were over at the Consortium today (that’s Dave and Margie’s house for those of you not familiar with my lame nicknames), and though I was trying my darndest to babble on about the game I ran at the Con yesterday, the conversation kept turning back around to the Blog: mine, his, and Meta-blogging issues in general. For a few minutes, we talked the way I imagine writers would talk when they hang out at each other’s houses, cleaning the basement.
- Does writing the journal change the way you interact with the world around you?
- Are you constantly checking to see if something you see or experience would be worth writing about?
- How do you remember that stuff long enough write about it later? (I’m considering carrying around a little notebook)).
Hell, the first rule of writing is keep a journal and write in it every day.
What I think is wild about the whole thing is that our experience with the Blog seems (at some level) to be very similar. We enjoy reading other’s stuff, and really get a charge out of the simple act of putting the words onto the screen.
It’s communication, which is really the purest form of entertainment, and that’s (at least) what bears-cave is about. It’s what the internet is about; my site’s pretty busy most days — I could probably make money off of it if I wanted to — maybe even enough to pay the (piddling) hosting fees. I work with people who do things like that, and I know it pays for itself, or they wouldn’t do it; for them, it’s not a labor of love or a labor of anything. It’s just labor.
But I don’t believe the internet is about commerce. Not at the heart of it. I think that’s why dot-coms have been failing with heartbeat-regularity — they’re trying to pound a sqaure peg through a round hole, pretending that the Internet has always been here to Make a Deal. You can make money, but that’s not what drives the Internet. It’s about Communication (it always has been), and Communication, class, is about Words.
That’s it. Words. Words don’t need Flash, Shockwave, IE6, or a T1 line. They just need people. People want to talk (and using this page is just talking as far as I’m concerned); people love to use words.
You think I’m full of shit, then riddle me this: if the internet had been conceived from the get-go as a means of marketing new products, where would it be today? It started as a means to talk, and that will always be the heart of it.
