Bagging the Blog (temporarily)

Picking up on the last line of my last post about Howard Kurtz, my own blogging ideas for the near future include an experiment: Taking my media-life and blog-work "offline" as much as possible through the end of the year. For the weblog, this could be just the break I need to back up and add categories to my old entries, making them more useable as "course notes" someday.

Outside the computer, I'll be doing pretty much the same thing: shuffling around boxes of books, photos, files and papers, making my life more organized and portable for whatever comes next.

To help me stay focused, I'm unplugging the TV tomorrow, my birthday, and will see how long it is before I at least feel the need to pick up a DVD at the library. The computer will stay online for e-mail only. I'll archive listserv messages instead of reading them and following the inevitable Web links.

In his book about being over-mediated, The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben's solution was to head for the great TV-free outdoors. It's a bit chilly for that right now in Massachusetts. For me, it may be enough "fresh air" to quit surfing, saving and scribbling on Web pages for a week or two.

I'm also inspired by a memo I stumbled on in 1985 at Multimate International, the software company where I had worked for a couple of years. I was composing a company history as part of an SEC filing so that the boss could sell out and buy an even bigger yacht to sail around the world. (He landed in Colorado; I wound up writing about yachts. Go figure.)

Creating the company narrative was a better job than trying to get reviewers to say nice things about software that was past its prime, despite its $2 million a month in sales. In the history files I hit a memo written by a chief engineer in the program's early days, which sums up my current feelings. It went something like this:

Sometimes I think the same announcement should be posted at the entrance to the Web during this day of proliferating interlinked weblogs. Well, my entrance to the Web, anyhow. For now, I'm going to pretend that I have enough documents.

6:27:20 PM