Chichi Bela’s and Sasha’s Bear Hunt version circa 1997
Essays & "First Post" links | |
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Bloggers Everywhere |
by Jozef Imrich - Why I blog: Hundreds of pages could be filled or just a sentence might capture some of the depth behind blogging. Blogging is interactive and in many ways inclusive. Anyone anywhere can shed a light on this strange cosmos of ours. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. - Dorothy Parker Why do I blog? Short Answer: To be heard. Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Life is too brief and the world is too small not to blog. Is it a way to let off steam and give your two cents? Does it satisfy a desire to climb the mountains or cross the rivers? Or is it an outlet for your various interests? Let me count the ways blogging can record anything delightful, surprising, or informative. Blogging is part of who I am ... First of all, I blog to keep up my spirit; to stir the spirit of others; to stir my blood, my brain, and my beliefs. I blog to meet curious people like Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, Shel Israel, Robert Scoble, Michael Schaefer, MJ Rose, Tim Dunhill, David Tiley and many others. Herman Melville put it best when he said, "We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results." Before I was a blogger, I was a reader of samizdat magazines and a brother who recorded how his sister Aga died at the communist chemical factory and how another sister, Gitka, was sacked for going to church. As bloggers, we share the deepest emotions on a regular basis and today I read a touching story by Lenn Pryor on the death of his sister "Lori Ann Pryor April 27, 1976 - Febuary 22, 2005." For me, jotting down facts and ideas as well as reading has always been an addiction. In the past, I used to post or email stories I thought might be of interest to friends and acquaintances. However, when the blog came along everything changed... it allowed me to cut down on the number of emails I sent. I still view blogging as emailing to everybody. Blogging regularly brings new ideas up, ideas I would never have thought of if I hadn't read other blogs and magazines on a similar subject. The more I blog the more I get addicted to reading other bloggers. Blogging inspires me to read more because reading introduces new ideas or forces me to rethink old ideas. If I learn something from my experiences, I hope it might be valuable to someone besides me. I have learned much about myself from reading others poems and stories; I hope that others can also learn something from my experiences and my writing. Deep down in the recesses of probably every blogger's heart is a realisation that we use each other for inspiration and motivation on our journey of self-discovery. I like to think of blogging as something more than just expressing ideas or sharing trends. I like to think I'm part of a wide selfless community. Blogs not only help to reveal who we are; they help us to transcend who we were. What I like about Blogging is that it is rather organic. There are no boundaries to ideas, interaction and optimism. Blogging can be as deep and wide as you make it to be ... In many ways, a blog is a playground dreamed up by a powerless voice just like the prophetic story of 1984 was dreamed up in 1948 by a powerless voice of George Orwell (Orwell - Why I Write).George Orwell saw writing not only as a powerful tool for conveying ideas, but also as a demanding and enthralling art with a moral imperative to search for truth. In an autobiographical note sixty years ago, Orwell said, "Good prose is like a window pane." Like Orwell, Vaclav Havel trusted his audience to share his values and understanding of the world, but he also sought to increase their political awareness. Blogging helps us to think for ourselves. Blogs allow us to speak our mind and it helps us to link to concrete realities. An individual blogger, like Winston Smith, sits down alone with courage and an optimistic belief in his own ideas to communicate his most secret thoughts to an unknown reader. Second, his dedication to truth, the product of independent thought, has the power to improve society. In our time, we desperately need Orwell's clear language, his commitment to aesthetic as well as moral responsibility. My purpose in this blog is to shed more hope and sunlight on complex and moral issues as where there is sunlight there is less likelihood for slime and mold to grow. What you see is what you get! To me a link like this one which I received this week from Shel and Robert is priceless: Warmly, Jozef Jozef's Blog: Media Dragon: Top 100 Cultural and Political Blog in 2004 AD |
