I’ve been advised to start writing a blog. So, I figured I’d better create some material. Hence, these words.
The WORD processor at my fingertips underlined the last sentence in the above paragraph, probably because it figured that ‘Hence, these words’ wasn’t a complete sentence. I don’t care. It also didn’t recognize the word, ‘blog’, and suggested that I add it to a dictionary. Reluctantly, I did. It’s amazing to me that so many books have been written for hundreds, nay, thousands of years without the obtrusive help of the WORD nanny.
For those of you who are getting this information in the far distant future, I should explain what a blog is.
At the turn of the 20th to the 21st century, there were still some people who gathered information by the written word; that is, reading. They were the stubborn holdouts, who still clung to this very old form of communication. Little symbols were aligned on flat sheets of paper, that were understood to represent many different sounds that could be created through articulate speech. As if this practice weren’t complicated enough, these sounds, called words, were designed to have many different meanings, which could be things, places, actions or ideas. For many years, these collections of papers were provided for public consumption through the publication of printed material in traditional, antiquated forms such as books, magazines, and newspapers. They were printed and sold by publishing companies for a profit. The publishing companies employed people to read the material to be considered for publication, and alter the content of that material, usually by adding or deleting words, phrases, or whole sections of text, in order to make the information more appealing and less offensive to the greatest number of people. The people who did this service for the publishing companies were called editors, and they were indispensable to the publishing process.
This was the state of affairs when the burgeoning internet of the late 20th century made it possible for images of this printed material to be available to anyone with a computer to be accessed and read online, or, as it were, out in the cybernetic ether. And it wasn’t long before a few intrepid souls were partaking in the even more difficult practice of writing their own articles and putting them out on the internet, thereby making them available to anyone with a computer who wished to see them. Thus, the blog was born.
So, a blog, is either an isolated, or, a regularly recurring series of literary installments available on the internet that was prepared for public consumption by an individual, or a group, without the encumbrance of having to convince someone in a publishing company of the piece’s worthiness, and, also, lacking the concomitant need to adulterate the work to satisfy a pesky editor.
It therefore follows that the advent of the blog has been a boon to the literary community. It makes available to the general public material that the publishing companies would regard as having little commercial potential, and, also, material that is free of the alloy of editors. This engenders less literary homogeneity.
So much for the form; now for the content.
At this point, the content is TBD.
Jonathan Womelsdorf 2019