blogging

The Writer’s Lament: Should Everyone Write a Blog?

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:02:33 -0800

Here's a repost from the past.

Writing is like sex. When you get the impulse to do it, you’re seldom in the right place, and when the atmosphere is sublime, you might not be in the mood. I suspect this accounts for the vast number of unsatisfying blogs written every day across America.

So goes my theory about the mysterious impulses of the mind and body. Blogging is a mystery to me, a modern curiosity that is trying to find its place in the history of mankind’s literary arts. The percentage of people who write a blog is growing every day, and it's changing the art of the word.

I’m coming to understand the art of blogging as a hybrid of inclination, narcissism, and curiosity. Do I come to my screen as the ancients did with a quill, looking to shape and frame an idea, a thesis, an ideology? Does the spontaneity of the medium favor only freshly baked insights, or is it all right to offer the timeless truths of an essayist? Am I truly a writer—or am I, as they say, merely a Cat Blogger, someone who enjoys telling you that my cat did such and such today with the profound assurance that someone cares? (Cat Bloggers, by the way, aren’t new; they’ve been around for centuries, but their daily rhapsodies were mercifully trapped in little diaries with cheap aluminum keys).

When I get the impulse to think, I write. The two are inextricably bound together. The millions of bloggers around the world haven’t figured out quite what they want to say until they’ve said it, and that’s precisely the point of blogging. Writing helps us take all of the tangled pieces of intellectual thread and string in the bottom of the sewing basket and make something of it. If you’re Milton, you design a tapestry for a castle wall; if you’re Eddie Callahan with a MySpace page, you come up with a cheesy macramé dream catcher for your girlfriend. That’s the mystery of writing.

I used to get frustrated by the sheer numbers of bloggers in the universe (the Huffington Post, Politico and the Drudge Report alone have over a thousand contributors) and we’re just talking about the professional writers. What about Jim and Stacey and Ricardo and Desiree and Lulu—all sorting through their sewing baskets on BlogSpot and Xanga and Googleblog? How come they have an audience, too, when they can’t even use a semicolon?

But I’m softening to the egalitarian ideals of blogging, especially as I see young people sorting our their own thoughts through language. Writing makes you commit to an opinion—if only for the space between one Send button to the next—and this is good. You might not have captured the Big Idea without it, and if you find out you were wrong, you go back and hit delete. The selfish, beautiful, transforming thing about writing is that I don’t always have to borrow other’s thoughts; I can create some for myself. My spiritual impulses—those prompted by prayer, love, or scripture—give me lots more pieces of string to work with. Lots of people create lousy thoughts, lazy thoughts, and borrowed thoughts, but writing helps us figure out which is which.

On the other side, such freedom makes it infinitely difficult to commit to the unchanging truths of a sacred text. The interpretation of the Bible, for example, is now more like a public swimming hole, where everyone performs his stupid tricks in the deep end without a lifeguard. We don’t know the difference between matters of opinion and matters of doctrine, and when that happens, somebody’s going to drown. Language alone cannot decipher the difference.. Don’t pretend that God needs to read your blog (He saw the first draft before you typed one letter), and sometimes even your mother might not even care, but that doesn't mean you should quit. Maybe you’re the one who needed to see what your mind was up to today. I say that’s good. Our souls have things to say, and sometimes it’s helpful to take a look at our thoughts in black and white.

In the 1800s Samuel Butler wrote: “The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.” His dated metaphor still works today. It's often easier to read everyone else's opinions and sway in the breezes of rhetoric rather than owning your own thoughts. I like Butler’s admonition: nurture your own cow and drink the milk warm and frothy, right from your own barn. It might have a short shelf life, but the hard work can be delicious.

Our Addiction to Public Communication

Brett McCracken — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:45:08 -0700

I wrote a new technology piece in Relevant magazine’s September/October issue, entitled “Short Attention Span Faith.” You can read the whole thing by clicking here, but here’s a short little excerpt:

Unsurprisingly, this frenzied, obsessive-compulsive proclivity toward being digital busybodies has deleterious effects on Christian disciplines like Bible study and prayer. How do we justify sitting down and praying for an hour when there are Hulu videos to browse, “What Ninja Turtle are you?” quizzes to take, and online “community” to cultivate? If we’re not wired, plugged-in, and communicating with the world at all times, it seems like such a waste of time…

…This is one of the biggest problems that must be reckoned with in the Twitter age: our ever diminishing inclination and/or ability to slow down and think thoroughly, deeply, and profoundly about anything. We speed through an article or web page in 60 seconds and pronounce it “read.” We see a blurb about our friend from high school’s weekend at the lake and pronounce the friendship “maintained.” But in this flurry of bite-sized narrative and dollar menu mediation, are we able to truly be self-aware? Can we consider things and know God and ourselves?

At the end of the day, it’s just hard for us to have interior thought lives anymore. It’s hard to keep anything to ourselves and be reflective just for ourselves. With Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and the quick-and-easy communication efficiency of cell phones, we’ve gotten used to the notion that anything worth saying can and should be shared with the digital community in real time. Any idea or thought worth having should be public. Everything is cooperative, collective, and wiki-oriented. When we sit alone and contemplate something that isn’t meant to be shared with the whole wide world, we almost don’t know what to do with ourselves.

I know this temptation all to well, as a writer/blogger who sometimes doesn’t value the “keep it to yourself” type of thinking. It’s so easy to say anything and everything to any and every one these days. It’s hard to keep thoughts, ideas, and rants to oneself when a huge audience is just a “publish” click away (I realize the irony that I’m blogging about this). Our culture has conditioned us to glory in attention and publicity and recognition; It’s only natural that we are increasingly finding it difficult to not live public lives. More and more, the defacto barometer of a well-lived life is not necessarily the quality or depth of our contribution to society but the breadth of it—the extent to which it is widely disseminated and known. It’s like the more Facebook friends or Twitter followers one has, the more actualized they are as a person.

What we communicate via these media platforms is not nearly as important as the fact that we have an audience, somewhere out there, listening or glimpsing into our lives. It affirms our existence, pats us on the existential back and sends us on our way, no better or worse off but for the few meaningless minutes or hours that we’ll never get back.

Hangin with LosWhit of RagamuffinSoul.com

CJ Casciotta — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 08:46:23 -0800

Carlos Whittaker's blog, RagamuffinSoul.com reaches more than 7,000 people a day. The guy is on the front lines of the church and its role in a web-driven culture. He's the Director of Service Programming at Buckhead Church which is one of the three North Point Community Church campuses in the Atlanta area. He oversees all the Sunday adult experience and design and directly oversees all areas Hosting, Production, Creative, Video, Music, and Programming at Buckhead Church. He also sits on the creative sermon planning team for Andy Stanley.

..More importantly, from the little I've interacted with him he's a great guy who loves Jesus and seeks the best for His people.

Yesterday was a crazy day for both of us, but we managed to find some time to talk (him from a Starbucks in Georgia and me from my office in California) and via the sweet technology of iChat video. Take a look:

Carlos Whittaker Interview from CJ Casciotta on Vimeo.