I have always considered myself as a serious writer. Whether I'm just going out into the world to collect the stories of my people (naks... feeling noble!) or simply sitting down to document the day's events, I have always seen a considerable amount of passion in the writing that I do.
That can be best proven by my old blog posts which reached its height during my Freshman year.
Vibrant, long, yet witty. That is how I believe my posts were. A lot would disagree in the background since I'm used to writing long blog posts typical of a philo reading. While I believe that my blog posts are 'easier' than the Marcelian text on Primary and Secondary Reflection, I still admit to the "crime" of verbosity and thus "suffered" the consequence of low viewership.
My friends say that for a blog post to be succesful, you should have just the right title and after that, the talk. Leave it to the gods if you will be blessed with a reply. And a lot of times I do. But it has always puzzled me, why do people get replies as much as 40 to 70, when all they did (at that point) was just to say what they did during the past few hours? Could it be that this person's social likeability is pouring out even in the cyberspace as well? Oh, I mean the blogosphere...
Social life, before, only consisted in the outdoor life. As what Steve Tuttle would tell you in "You Can't Friend Me, I Quit!" the moment he knew Facebook (and gave up on it), he decided to go back to the "real Facebook" - that is, his "local bar where everybody knows your name...[where] status updates thre are said in real time by real people". And if you think Facebook is any disparate from blogging, I'll be the first to digress. Because in a world of online social networking, blogging seems to be the cord that links you to the entire world. "Everybody should have a blog!" one unnamed blogger says. The inevitability of opinions and ideas is what bloghosts bank upon. And it is this realization that bloghosts sell to which bloggers chance upon.
Blog post content and length are two very contentious issues. And I can say that it's very relative and very fluid. There can never be a single shot solution to the 'ideal blog post'. Some say that at 800 words, the blog post is fine. But modern 'practitioners' say that due to a person's limited attention span in cyberspace, anything more than 500 words is already a chore and worthy of shelving. I even remember asking Abby Yao, a Communication graduate and one of my intellectual sources, whether there is a link between personal likeability and online likeability since she studied the blogs of Pinay British immigrants and things like that. While her answer (during that conference) satisfied my wonder to a sizeable degree, I believe that there could be more to the 70 replies from 70 different people. Either there is THAT something about the blog post or the person blogging in general.
The second issue I grapple with regarding blog maintaining is personal space. From the humanistic perspective, personal space is something inviolable and in a sense, sacred. It is at this space that a person flourishes to be what he/she wants to be without the necessary intervention by other people. I don't know what philosophy is that; but I know it is directed towards personal space and freedom.
And then I encounter a friend who was met with intense opposition after a "scathing" blog post. It was [said to be] so scathing that people started talking to him about the blog post and the people's perceptions of things. The most scathing thing, for me, was when I heard "You have a very active online life..." to begin this long chain of admonitions culminating in "You shouldn't have written this blog post. You should have kept things to yourself." If that is the case at which our blogs now work, then why are we even maintaining a blog in the first place?
It's a serious dialectic, however. It makes me think - is there such a thing as freedom in this world? Dr. Remmon Barbaza once shared in a Philosophy seminar I attended that freedom cannot really be proven as existing. If you must, you'll be entangled in all these arguments from different perspectives. I say, then, if we can't be in our own supposed personal space, then why maintain that space in the first place?
Freedom of expression has it limits, I know. It is never absolute, as your High School History teacher will say. "Big Brother is watching," George Orwell will tell you. But then again, the question remains: if we can't be who we are online, then why continue being online? That is my sense of a blogger's fatigue - a fatigue which transcends mere tiredness or inactivity. It's a lack of faith in the same and a common fear that what I write might actually bite.
But writing is an art of telling the truth. A truth that which we put our lives into. A truth that we're willing to defend. And many times what we believe as true is relative and inapplicable to people. But if we have to live in truth, then we have to face what is true - even if it entails scratching another and causing it to bleed.
Because untruth is the greatest folly of human existence.
That can be best proven by my old blog posts which reached its height during my Freshman year.
Vibrant, long, yet witty. That is how I believe my posts were. A lot would disagree in the background since I'm used to writing long blog posts typical of a philo reading. While I believe that my blog posts are 'easier' than the Marcelian text on Primary and Secondary Reflection, I still admit to the "crime" of verbosity and thus "suffered" the consequence of low viewership.
My friends say that for a blog post to be succesful, you should have just the right title and after that, the talk. Leave it to the gods if you will be blessed with a reply. And a lot of times I do. But it has always puzzled me, why do people get replies as much as 40 to 70, when all they did (at that point) was just to say what they did during the past few hours? Could it be that this person's social likeability is pouring out even in the cyberspace as well? Oh, I mean the blogosphere...
Social life, before, only consisted in the outdoor life. As what Steve Tuttle would tell you in "You Can't Friend Me, I Quit!" the moment he knew Facebook (and gave up on it), he decided to go back to the "real Facebook" - that is, his "local bar where everybody knows your name...[where] status updates thre are said in real time by real people". And if you think Facebook is any disparate from blogging, I'll be the first to digress. Because in a world of online social networking, blogging seems to be the cord that links you to the entire world. "Everybody should have a blog!" one unnamed blogger says. The inevitability of opinions and ideas is what bloghosts bank upon. And it is this realization that bloghosts sell to which bloggers chance upon.
Blog post content and length are two very contentious issues. And I can say that it's very relative and very fluid. There can never be a single shot solution to the 'ideal blog post'. Some say that at 800 words, the blog post is fine. But modern 'practitioners' say that due to a person's limited attention span in cyberspace, anything more than 500 words is already a chore and worthy of shelving. I even remember asking Abby Yao, a Communication graduate and one of my intellectual sources, whether there is a link between personal likeability and online likeability since she studied the blogs of Pinay British immigrants and things like that. While her answer (during that conference) satisfied my wonder to a sizeable degree, I believe that there could be more to the 70 replies from 70 different people. Either there is THAT something about the blog post or the person blogging in general.
The second issue I grapple with regarding blog maintaining is personal space. From the humanistic perspective, personal space is something inviolable and in a sense, sacred. It is at this space that a person flourishes to be what he/she wants to be without the necessary intervention by other people. I don't know what philosophy is that; but I know it is directed towards personal space and freedom.
And then I encounter a friend who was met with intense opposition after a "scathing" blog post. It was [said to be] so scathing that people started talking to him about the blog post and the people's perceptions of things. The most scathing thing, for me, was when I heard "You have a very active online life..." to begin this long chain of admonitions culminating in "You shouldn't have written this blog post. You should have kept things to yourself." If that is the case at which our blogs now work, then why are we even maintaining a blog in the first place?
It's a serious dialectic, however. It makes me think - is there such a thing as freedom in this world? Dr. Remmon Barbaza once shared in a Philosophy seminar I attended that freedom cannot really be proven as existing. If you must, you'll be entangled in all these arguments from different perspectives. I say, then, if we can't be in our own supposed personal space, then why maintain that space in the first place?
Freedom of expression has it limits, I know. It is never absolute, as your High School History teacher will say. "Big Brother is watching," George Orwell will tell you. But then again, the question remains: if we can't be who we are online, then why continue being online? That is my sense of a blogger's fatigue - a fatigue which transcends mere tiredness or inactivity. It's a lack of faith in the same and a common fear that what I write might actually bite.
But writing is an art of telling the truth. A truth that which we put our lives into. A truth that we're willing to defend. And many times what we believe as true is relative and inapplicable to people. But if we have to live in truth, then we have to face what is true - even if it entails scratching another and causing it to bleed.
Because untruth is the greatest folly of human existence.
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