Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

It’s 7:15pm and finally Blogger is back up and running.

I could lament the fact that I missed my chance to blog the day after the US election… but I won’t. First of all, there’s nothing to say that hasn’t already been said. And second of all, I was too busy at work to blog.

Besides, according to CBS MarketWatch, nobody’s reading blogs anyway. Well, that’s certainly true in my case…

Iranian bloggers have been arrested for dissent for having “illegal internet sites”:

Six online journalists and webloggers have been arrested in Iran recently in a crackdown on dissent on the internet.

“People charged for having illegal internet sites… will be put on trial soon,” said a judiciary spokesman.

The trials would be “open” and charges included “acting against national security, disturbing the public mind and insulting sanctities”.

Web journals flourish in Iran where the youthful, reform-hungry population has gone online for news and entertainment.

The popularity of the internet has grown as hardline judges closed about 100 printed publications since 2000.

These six will probably be held up as examples and handed some frightening sentence… all for the crime of speaking freely against the repressions of the government.

But of course, everyone knows that it’s Israel that is the real problem in the Middle East…

(Via Damian Penny, who astutely describes this as “thoughtcrime”).

Lynn B. is taking a break of unknown duration, to try to sort things out:

When I started this blog, it was in the hope that it would help me to make some sense out of the bloodbath being perpetrated against Israel and the inexplicable indifference and even approval with which most of the rest of the world was responding. It’s not working. In fact, my attempts to keep on top of events and to interpret their implications are only turning me into a bigger bundle of nerves than I was before.

[ . . . ]

At any rate, this is a roundabout way of saying that I’m taking a mental health break of uncertain duration. I’m hopefully going to be spending more time in the garden and actually talking face-to-face with people and less time in front of this box. Maybe that will help. We’ll see.

Lynn’s commentary is some of the most sensible on the web. And I for one will miss her.

But as for trying to explain the inexplicable, well, I sympathize. Sometimes the world just seems so nuts and upside-down, it’s challenging to my sanity to even blog about it. So I take breaks. I focus on work. I hang out with friends, see stupid movies, read paperbacks, travel, go out, visit family, and do other normal everyday events of my life.

Somehow, though, I keep coming back. The world isn’t going to make any more sense than it did before, but maybe it’s about the small triumphs, the accomplishments that in some tiny way do help to make sense of even one sliver of the world. Or maybe it’s just an addiction. In any case, I have a sneaking suspicion (and a hope) that Lynn will be back soon.

Ok, maybe not funniest ever. But pretty damn funny. I challenge you to read this without laughing.

Oh, scroll down on the page past the movie review first. (Via Tainted Glass.)

Proof that Internet and website campaigns can make a difference (via Israpundit):

When you search for the word “Jew” in Google, you no longer get an antisemitic hate site as the top result. Thanks to a web campaign to create links like Jew and Jew, those two sites are now ranked 1-2. The aforementioned hate site has dropped to third, plus when you click on it, you get a message saying the person’s account has been suspended.

Individual site owners may not feel like they have much power, but when everyone works together, things can change for the better. It’s encouraging.

A few months ago, the blogosphere was abuzz with the Onion’s satire “Mom finds out about blog”. The ultimate embarrassing nightmare.

But this cool Mom not only knows about her 14-year-old daughter’s blog, she supports it fully… and in fact, considers her daughter better educated and informed thanks to blogging (via Imshin):

So even if she hadn’t received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile’s regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she’s not and here’s why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

I think she’s absolutely right. Kids are constantly warned about the dangers of the Internet and all the bad stuff that they can have access to. But what about the kids and teenagers who benefit from the Internet by having access to a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives on world events, political issues, and society? I happen to think that, all else being equal, the more access to information that students have, the better – at any age.

Now if only I could teach my mom how to program the VCR…

David Janes defends bloggers:

One of the things I enjoyed about the blogosphere [is the] commitment [of] most of the bloggers I read to “anti-idiotarianism”, a commitment to truth even if it doesn’t promote their narrow political prejudices. Many of the top-tier warbloggers were Democrats, not out-of-the-closet unreformed Neanderthals. Check it out, if you need to. And it’s just not a case of “conservatives are liberals who have been mugged”: there’s a great diversity of opinion, civil debate and politic belief within the blogosphere, because there’s a basic commitment to the non-distortion of reality and the truth.

We’ll never have a “vibrant new global thinking process” if one’s concept of debate is to declare “blue is red” just because some guy you hate mentioned the colour of the sky the other day.

I’m not entirely convinced that bloggers are necessarily more honest or “committed to the truth” than mainstream journalists, professional writers, politicians, or the average guy on the street. Blogging is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be used to educate, provoke, spew nonsense, or (in my case) spout off.

In its infancy, blogging was perhaps “purer”, in the sense that most blogs were individuals writing on their own time and budget, as opposed to some of the big blogs we see now that have emerged into moneymaking careers. (Note to readers: that’s obviously not the case here.) In addition, bloggers are generally not journalists with professional training and a research staff. It’s extraordinarily easy for just about anyone to set up a blog, and they can just as readily be used to spread lies, propaganda, and disinformation. If a sort of “anti-idiotarian” courtesy emerged in the blogosphere, it is only because people decided that they want to be good neighbours and play by the rules. But blogging is just as open to abuse as any other medium, and perhaps more so. And with the emerging of a few major blogs that dictate the sphere, it seems that the rest of us mortals have been reduced to begging for scraps… or the ever-coveted link from Instapundit to generate Instatraffic.

That said, I think it’s illogical to lament the fact that someone is blogging a different point of view from yours. With so much going on out there, the only way to really figure anything out and have opinions is to read a wide variety of opinions, often dissenting ones. And blogs have made that much easier.

The talk of the blogosphere has been the article in this week’s Onion: Mom finds out about blog.

Yeah, that’s gotta suck. I personally nearly split my head open from falling off the chair when I read it. It’s funny cause it’s true… we’re willing to publicize our lives for total strangers, but are horrified to think our parents might google us and catch on.

(Mom, Dad, if you guys are reading this, I swear, those weirdos who keep flaming my comments fields aren’t stalking me!)

Update: Actually I changed my mind. Mom, Dad, if you’re reading this – just don’t, ok?

Second update: Blogger has come out with an official response full of advice for mom-weary bloggers.

Everyone’s blogging these days it seems . . . even our next Prime Minister.

I’m having a stressful day. Just needed to vent. See? I knew blogging had a purpose!