Are we drowning? Our life -- and the remembrance of blogposts past -- flashes before us as we upload a "contact sheet" of images (above) from the Pentax Optio 450 into Apple's elegant iPhoto image-management program on the awesome new iMac G5. Highlights (with links to posts where they appeared), top to bottom: GW standing firm on Iraq, Down East sunrise, Baby poolside, Tony Blair at G8, post London bombings, relics of departing Gomer computer (scroll down), Tiny and Baby catnapping and an "Althouse Moment" (photo below).
An "Althouse Moment" -- aka the secret life of inanimate objects revealed by the camera's eye -- from our latest contact sheet shows underlined and annotated newspaper and magazine clippings from the Nineties, illustrating primitive pre-internet snail-blogging techniques.
"Blogging is art," writes Ann Althouse, rejecting "both the work and play models" proposed by others:
Stephen Bainbridge is saying that blogging -- for lawprofs anyway -- is just for fun. He's reacting to Douglas Berman, who's asking the dauntingly somber question: "How might we improve blogs as an academic medium?" Well, jeez, Doug, if you're going to phrase it like that, you're going to propel me all the way over to the hedonistic side, where I don't even want to be . . .
Blogging means much more to me than either concept expresses. Blogging is life -- in writing, in public. It's not a job or a break from a job. It's everything you might think about.
Spoken like the true artist that Ann is. Being of that bent ourselves, we totally agree, but it's a big blogosphere out there, so we say blog and let blog. Or, as Robert Louis Stevenson might have written had he been born in our day:
The world is so full of such bloggable things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Many people immersed in various means of livelihood not connected with writing or public relations or broadcasting do none the less have minds that consider and evaluate all the topics of the past, present, and the future which occupy the Media. Blogging is an opportunity to express these thoughts and submit them to the blogosphere. Those who express themselves intelligently are evaluated and receive recognition. What's wrong with that. Is it politically incorrect?
Posted by: goomp | August 02, 2005 at 03:52 PM
Blogging has... so far... defied all efforts to pigeonhole it. I think that's fabulous.
Like all the best things in life - it is what you make it.
Posted by: Teresa | August 03, 2005 at 05:04 PM