Old, In the Way, and Blogging
Those of us who typed our college termpapers would often mock our parents for not being "with it," for not understanding the unique pressures and anger felt by the Baby Boom generation. The Generation Gap was as real as the Mekong Delta and Woodstock Nation.
Fast forward, no, blast forward into the early 21st century and a generation stands stunned, disbelieving that today's 40-year-olds were born after the Kennedy assassination (the first one), grappling with the indecipherable music, appalling dress, and loose morals of their own kids, yet desperately seeking to remain hip, to keep an open mind, and most of all, to ensure that the terrible mutual misunderstandings common with them and their parents are not repeated this time around.
Boomers took early leadership of the personal computing age. They crafted a seamless transition in geek leadership from the white-shirted electrical engineers who invented computers to the more casually dressed computer jockeys with names like Gates and Allan, Wozniak and Jobs, and of course, Danny Bricklin.
Yet most Boomers are not truly comfortable with computers, certainly not in the way their kids are. And with the Web only a decade old, most adults still do not wholly comprehend the power inherent in a vast, linked cyberuniverse with millions of electronic inhabitants.
Now comes blogging. Another invention credited at least ni part to hip Boomers, blogging is something that many Boomer unhipsters can't quite grock.
"Most blogs I've seen are vapid crapola," opined a long-time associate of mine. "So what?" is all I can say about that. It doesn't matter. Most creative efforts in any medium through the millennia are vapid crap in a lot of people's eyes. That doesn't sully the medium, be it painting, music, the bildungsroman, or the blog.
What is a blog? You tell me, please. Is it a collection of quick takes heavily populatd with links? A collection of off-the-cuff reporters' notes? A rant? A rave? A flame? A capitalist/politico tool?
Just as e-mail was bringing back the lost art of letter writing before it became subsumed in an ocean of incoherent corporate directives and spam, blogging could encourage a new generation of newspaper-style columnists (think Ivins, Sowell, Will, Ellen Goodman et al, except imagine the new ones coming from some place other than the Boston-Washington corridor and having views other than orthodox American liberal or conservative) and episodic novelists (think Dickens, Twain, and more recently, Armisted Maupin).
I guess...seems like this could be the case. Another recent Web phenomenon, chat rooms, seem to encourage the basest expression and worst spelling imaginable (mostly due to its promise of anonymity), blogging seems to encourage better manners, better writing, and hey, with luck, might enable the Internet to perform something useful to society for a change!
8:56:12 PM 
|
|
