Hello Internet!

Here's an introductory blog-post about starting a blog.

Hold your applause . Keep holding it. Continue to hold it...

Okay, so it's not applause worthy. I know nothing about writing a blog. This is my first foray into the domain of blogging. I have only ever read them before, not written one. When I first heard the word "blogging" I thought it was a combination of "banging" and "flogging" which brought up all sorts of BDSM-type notions... Also, I have now reached the point where I have repeated the word "blogging" so many times that it now sounds like a meaningless series of syllables. Fun. For. Everyone.

So, without further ado, I present to you my opinion about blogging.

First, the positives:

It can allow people to connect and share life experience. Blogging can bring people with similar experiences to connect and form community.  It can also create awareness of lived experience for those who may not have understood before and do not have that particular life-experience. Enhancing human understanding is pretty rad.

Blogging can help create and strengthen discourse. It can be an awesome forum to talk about new ideas and engage critically with ideas both old and new--without the time-delay of trying to get published in a book, magazine or journal. Uncensored and unfilitered--mmmm, that's gooood discourse! And strong discourse can be the foundation of real-life activism. Planting the seeds of some change-creating discontent.

And now the negatives:

Blogging can shut down and narrow discourse as much as it can strengthen it. It is far too easy to read only what you agree with and respond only with praise, thus narrowing the scope of ideas you explore. With this particular problem, blogging can start to amount to group verbal masturbation. Lots of fun for everyone, but ultimately not productive and not very interesting.

It is also far too easy to respond in a knee-jerk way to ideas you don't like with big-ol' flame. A nice, all-caps, ad-hominem fallacy--"you are quite obviously an ignorant douche-nugget, and I am not going to listen to a thing you say from here on out or respond with an articulated, unpacked reason(s) why I dislike your ideas because fuuuuuuuuck yooooou." But with more capslock and less punctuation. The stuff that faith-in-humanity-destroying-comment-sections are made of. (Ah, youtube, one minute you're watching a kitten video, the next you scroll down and someone has unleashed a rant that is antisemetic, homophobic, misogynist and racist all at the same time.)

So, for my part, I shall try to welcome open discourse and different ideas. I shall also try not to respond to flames with more flames. Afterall, I don't want to burn my first blog down.