Blog is a funny word

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Sometimes I feel weird when ‘blog­ging’ is talked about in public. I feel silly writ­ing about this, but I think it’s a decent anal­ogy of how some­thing can grow and change when given to the masses.

When I was younger, musi­cal genres ‘emo’ and ‘indie rock’ were cool and not main­stream, and I par­tially loved it for its counter-​pop cul­ture qual­ity. (I’ve since out­grown such exclu­sive awk­ward­ness, really!) Now that those once-‘underground sounds’ have become main­stream, though, they have changed con­sid­er­ably. People under­stand them dif­fer­ently and have given them new def­i­n­i­tions. My wife’s middle-​school stu­dents tell us so.

We see evi­dence of this when we shop at places like Target and see t-shirts with old com­pany logos and cool band graph­ics on them. Who’da thought we’d one day be able to shop at Target for all our cool cloth­ing needs?

In a reverse sorta way, it’s sim­i­lar to how one might feel if their mom wanted to be their friend on MySpace or Face­book. (I’ve mostly com­mit­ted to clos­ing my Face­book account the day my mom wants to be my Inter­net friend. I still love her, though! Naturally.)

Of course, not every­one feels this way about their par­ents. I remem­ber going to a cer­tain show (a.k.a. ‘con­cert’) sev­eral years ago. My brother and I weren’t old enough to drive, so our par­ents drove us. After the bands played, I was rather mor­ti­fied to real­ize that my par­ents had hung around, and I saw my mom having a con­ver­sa­tion with the singer of one of the bands. This is mine! I thought. How embarrassing. How stupid I feel think­ing back on that. Per­haps in a few years time, I will know how it feels to be on the other side.

And so it is with the web. Blog­ging in the last few years has risen to main­stream grip, open­ing up new jobs in writ­ing, giving new mean­ing to pub­lish­ing, jour­nal­ism and public dis­course. And for the most part I love it! I have no desire to ‘go back’ to how things used to be. But some­times I still feel weird when people talk about it in public. And some­times I wish I didn’t know any­thing about the web so that it could be as mag­i­cal as pre­sented by Martha Stewart.