Just as we now live in public, so do we think in public. And that is accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge.
Blogging and Audience
Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)Posts can have meaning and purpose even if there is no audience, it’s all down to the intent of the author. If they do happen to land “with someone in some useful way” then that’s a bonus.
This reminds me of Clive Thompson’s discussion of the way in which even the worst bloggers make use smarter:
“There must be a underlying reason,” responds Colin Walker, “why someone writes a blog rather than senselessly throwing the literary equivalent of faeces at social networks.” Length, context, and an internal compulsion that would bring more psychic discomfort to ignore than it would bring to pursue. The fact is, whether perceived as an over-simplification or not, I’ve no grand design here, no grand purpose. I write any given blog post so that my brain doesn’t hurt because I didn’t write it, and often even then my brain hurts anyway. Simon Woods is right, in the big picture, that if you want not just context but clarity, you probably should blog, but being “part of a possibly public discussion” would be, in the thing that Walker and I agree on, just a bonus. Aaron Davis might want to tie it to Clive Thompson’s notion of blogging as thinking out loud and “accelerating the creation of new ideas and the advancement of global knowledge”, but that just returns us to my not wasting cognitive or emotional energy on impact. My blogging is purely personal, if publicly performative.
Author: Bix
The unsupported use case of a mediocre, autistic midlife in St. Johns, Oregon —now with added global pandemic.
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This touches on Clive Thompson’s argument for the power of public: