As I have wrestled over the past year with the idea of stopping all this blogging nonsense, I have been turned around each time by an avalanche of comments and emails. It’s very easy to forget while thumping away at a keyboard in the dead of night that your thoughts and opinions will be broadcast across the world when you hit the submit button - in the same manner that you occasionally dig through the flotsam and jettsam for voices that speak to you - your voice may speak to others. Thousands of others.
What has brought all this to mind?
I recently lost one of the voices I read for many years - an amazing, opinionated, honest writer in the American mid-west. She was killed in a car crash in the early hours of the morning. News of the accident circled the globe in minutes - passed from country to country by those that had read her.
This evening, while trudging through the personal hell that is my Google Reader blogroll, I happened upon a post from another long time inspiration, announcing the retirement of her blog. It was a shock. Another voice gone.
What on earth is happening?
My resolve became focussed as I read a post from another corner of the world about the mania to monetize blogs. Given the impending death of the newspaper industry, and the empowerment that the internet as a publishing platform has brought to fruition, I can understand the reasons the hoards of shallow money men and marketeers have arrived, but it doesn’t make me like the situation any more.
I can’t help feeling that everybody is missing the point. We are the point. People. Our thoughts. Our voices. The community we have built, on the platforms we have built. Anything else will eventually prove to be unimportant. You only have to look at the current success of twitter to realise that all people really want to do is communicate. They don’t care how, and they will put up with a huge level of interference in that communicationbefore they cease trying.
It is with this belief in mind that I find myself quite unexpectedly digging my heals in. Standing my ground. If nobody else is going to, then I damn well am going to carry on writing, and tell my story. It will be heard by those who choose to seek it out.
I will not go quietly into the night.