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March 04, 2004
I Promise to Call if My House Burns Down
O.k.... so I probably wouldn't like the average literary magazine editor, but this little rant about the social burdens non-bloggers bear was pretty worth my time:
"There was a time when my friends and I got together to chat about our lives, a time when any problem could be resolved in the warm light of our camaraderie and beer. And then my friends became bloggers. These days, I do not even hear about the stupid stuff that's going on-- 'I got a haircut' or 'My apartment burned down' -- because the bloggers assume that I have read about it on their blog. Which I have not. And then I wonder why they are not answering their home phone, and immediately assume we are in a fight."
I hereby pledge to never, ever refuse further comment in a meatspace conversation by saying "I blogged about it, so..."
Maybe I should expand that pledge to promising to never use the word "blog" ever again. At 2:03 in the morning, having just rocked the boy to sleep, sitting here listening to DirecTV's jazz channel while I wait to see if bottle, blanket, and bouncing will stick, the thought of never hearing that word again as anything other than, perhaps, an exclamatory bit of dialogue in a caveman movie seems sort of pleasant.
Posted by mph at March 4, 2004 02:12 AM
Comments
Did you just coin the term "meatspace"? Damn, that's the hippest thing I've heard all week!
Posted by: Sven at March 4, 2004 10:32 AM
I'm afraid "meatspace" isn't mine. I've seen it variously credited to John Perry Barlowe and William Gibson
1. http://www.wordspy.com/words/meatspace.asp (dates the term back only to 1993, probably because the author of the entry stopped where the common Web does)
2. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/meatspace.html
3. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?MeatSpace (which cites the less vulgar but less used "big blue room.")
Posted by: mph at March 4, 2004 11:33 AM
so, uh, when i was writing in my blog more regularly than i am now (when i still lived in california and it was the only way not to actually kill anyone), when my bf used to call and ask what had happened that day i would say, in a very repeatable but indescribable tone of voice: "didja READ the blog?"
even in its less-than-regular updates, it's still the best source of info about me. and reading regularly about others gives me more to talk about w/ them, so there. it's like a social lubricant. :) (speaking of which, i liked the quote in the article about "friendster...is basically just a gateway drug." i can see how that could be true, though it definitely wasn't for me).
Posted by: gl. at March 4, 2004 11:52 AM
I dunno, gl. People don't always ask "What happened today?" because they want the facts, they do it because they want to ineteract. I mean, bully for the blog if it causes a conversational segue like "So, I read you went to..." or "How were the beans at that restaurant you wrote about?"
But not bully for the blog if it causes conversation stoppers like "Well, I blogged it and don't want to go through it all again," because someone could, given some conversational styles, merely be asking as an opening gambit... an attempt to get you to prioritize the day's output or see if you're up to discussing a matter of personal importance that might be sitting there on the blog more as a matter of catharsis than something you wish to keep open for discussion.
And some people don't have the will or wherewithal to make sure to go down the blogroll before turning up at a social event.
But I'm coming at the issue from the perspective of a relentless self-editor. PuddingTime! gets much less than five percent of my total emotional output, so the thought of creating a record of my day that I'd call more definitive than any response I'd give to a simple query is pretty alien. I'm not going to write about some things too important to put out in public, and I'm not going to mention anything under the purview of "business" because I just don't do that. So this is an inferior record. Nothing to expect people to consult and certainly nothing I'd insist they refer to.
Posted by: mph at March 4, 2004 12:30 PM
yes, i prefer to hear, "so what about the details you left out?" and in general, a blog is often a record for me & my mundanities; i can't imagine anyone else caring about what i ate yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
but also, sometimes writing about it once, especially when i worked at csusm, was much easier than having to hash it out three or four times to different people. at that point, instead of saying the same thing all over again, i wanted their different perspectives on what had happened and we could talk about -that- instead of the pain of the original story. it's like front-loading. and it's not like a lot of the people i knew when i was in california actually were in the same state as i was. :)
more importantly, when -other- people have blogs, it gives me a more comfortable window of exploration with them initially than if i was thrown into a room w/ them at a social gathering. yeek! :)
Posted by: gl. at March 5, 2004 01:21 PM
more importantly, when -other- people have blogs, it gives me a more comfortable window of exploration with them initially than if i was thrown into a room w/ them at a social gathering.
I know, that yucky talking and all. It's like the punchline joke, soon you can just start saying "/archives/2003/10/04!" I don't record everything that happens to me for the most part. Partially because, well, it's none of your damn business, and also because my family isn't comfortable with me talking about them in this space. As well as the fact that for the most part I communicate with them by-gasp!-talking to them. For me this is mostly about pointing out interesting things I find online, quite often the more egregious, shall we say, excesses of "personally empowered citizens media."
Posted by: jbm at March 6, 2004 06:13 AM
I include some of the most mundane, pedantic crap you'll ever read on my site. That's mostly because I use my blog (yech! I hate that word) to keep in touch with my friends who are off in college while I finish senior year. They all have blogs of their own, so we're able to keep abreast of what's going on in each other's lives even though we're separated by geography.
Posted by: nate at March 6, 2004 06:49 PM
I know, that yucky talking and all.
hello, extrovert. meet introvert. so nice to meet you. personally, i find multimodal communication so much richer than restricting myself to one simple form. using the various strengths of the media & all.
Posted by: gl. at March 6, 2004 10:15 PM