Why Blogging?

why do people blog?

Well the most obvious answer is that people enjoy doing it. Most people like the sound of their own voices, and i am one of them. I like to talk/write. But there is more than just that, why do people just not write in their dairies, or get one. Well its kinda like talking to yourself, no one is listening, so when people like to talk they like to have an audience. So all these bloggers are trying to attract people to either visit their blog or make a comment. Still why do people blog? It is and was popular to blog there are, i am assuming, countless blogs that have been abandoned due to lack of interest, fad changing, and lifestyle change etc. I think to a certain extent blogging is an online fad. There are those who will do it regardless of what the mainstream is doing, but right now it is popular, or was to have your own blog.

Who are those people who blog, well it is obvious that those who blog have to be internet users. Those would be people who have an interest in the internet, and spend their spare time on it, or work with computers. You can see how people who are stuck in their cubical all f’ing day long doing just the bare minimum to keep their job be attracted to blogs and forums. Blogging is a product of our society; it is something that we do with our spare time. It fits perfectly with our high pace society, because you can log in anywhere and do not need a lot of time to get down what you want.

Will we keep blogging? Well as the web transforms to Web 2.0 it will be interesting to see whether blogging will continue to be popular or will it fall into select communities which are the more technological savy and alternative to mainstream. This may already be happening, will things like facebook, which can integrate all these components together take away the blogging spirit.

But think about this, you go on vacation, to some where really nice, tropical, or some kind of nice resort, with good friends and family and there is lots of booze food and entertainment. In this idyllic vacation does blogging come into it? Would those who are truly addicted even than, through force of habit need to express themselves through a blog? If that is the case, does blogging really give you that much pleasure? and if it does explore what exactly about blogging that does create that sensation.

But maybe there is something deeply natural about blogging. Human nature has the tendency to tell stories, what a better way than blogging to get your stories out there into the world and in a relatively safe and very accessible way of storing them

What I have learned

Well i guess this is a little late, being started at 12:15, but nonetheless its not too late 😉 well atleast5 beers to late atleast

I have come to view the internet in a different light. It has changed a bit from a purely unromantic side to a more romantic side where one can have many of their desires realized is a different fashion. I had participated in a online forum for several years which did give me a well rounded perspective of the internet. This class has inspired me to re-enter the online experience to harken back to the days before web.20. To go back to the days when you talk to people who you are interested in and try to gain rank by posting constantly. I now have this romantic notion that the internet has this sociological community which has warm and fuzy feelings independent of the cold text.

I have had a geeky interest in Warhammer, which is a complicated game with plastic/medal models where you have pitched battles where you try to annihilate the enemy. So inspired by the embracement of web communities i decided to joint this website called warseer.

Over all i was not unfamiliar with alot of the internet terms and jargon, yet i was intrigued how the authors can make the internet such a fantastical romantic place. Even the article about the internet rape puts that community in some kind of epic terms where the all of the greatest minds of the lands congregate to deal with the problem. It makes me think of places and things that seem so cool, yet in many cases i have participated in these exact things and experienced that transition from newbie to veteran.

I do agree that the internet is a field that is underdeveloped and can explain alot about human nature, but really how far are these authors romanticizing the reality of thins that are really going on. Or maybe i have it wrong, in that this is just part of the medium, whether the author is enthusiastically talking about a bingo(as in gambling) community that pulls together to help people in comparison to an online one that helps people may just be the same thing. When you are a participant of something any ones outside view is going to be different.

Online Pornography

I find that this a topic which is often neglected, or just avoided. I do not know what the statistic is, but a very large portion of the internet is dedicated to pornography. In some articles, researchers mention that men use internet for sexual means, and i think that this rings true. I assume that the vast majority of visitors to pornography sites are male, obviously there is small percentage that is female but they are not the driving market to buy subscriptions. Here is a cute video that makes this explicit about the amount of porn on the internet.

Like everything on the internet, porn shares the same trends. there websites which are only based upon the web and have not physical location. I do not know the full history of pornography but there are certain success stories in the porn industry. The amateur porn scene has exploded, so many people are fearful of finding themselves naked on the net. This can be reflected in even the amount of pornography websites dedicated to either an amateur feel or, are actually amateur porn sights that have contributions from members who want to post their sexual life.

It is interesting that almost right away the internet got a dark side. This immediate manifestation was pornography which invaded the website with chauvinistic demeaning pictures of women. This still remains as the predominant theme of the pornographic internet. There are websites like Playboy, and others that deal with sexual stuff. And there are some websites that are not completely misogynistic. But the vast majority women are paid something to be objectified. The vast majority of this market is borderline criminal with all these prevailing beliefs that the sex industry is bad. Why cannot we be honest about our sexuality, why must it come to this, where men, and some women have to use all these morally dubious means to get their rocks off. 

When the Rich Wage War its the Poor who Die

I took this quote form Linkin Park in their song. Linkin Park is not really known for their political activism compared to many other bands, like Stone Sour, or Rage Against the Machine, or System of Down, but I do like their Nu Metal sound and they put things in such a simple matter. I have always looked to the US with some fear and disdain. It is that empire which horrifies the viewer yet enthralls them with fascination as it plunders its way through the world. Most can agree that when the venerable Bush was elected to office things went downhill. I mean even under Bill Clinton, who I think did a superb job as president(Including the blow job), the American administration was not really that good, or moral. The seeds of American Imperialism had been sown far before my time, or Bush’s. Bush is just a unfortunate canidate to make those ambitions fully realized.

Under Clinton’s reign there was a proposal sumbitted to the president urging him to take America into a new phase in the international scene. It called for a “New American Century”, this was written by a neo-con think tank which would provide the agenda for Bush’s reign. The group behind this was aptly called “The Project for a New American Century” . This proposal called for a “New pearl harbor” which would enable the US administration to gather public support for offensive campaigns. The Neo-conservatives differed from normal republicans in that, they were not interested in lowering the deficit, quite on the contrary they wanted to control the fucking world. With Bush’s “election” their hopes and dreams were in the hands of a incompetent idiot.

Bush and his administration have attempted to intiate most of the priorities laid out by the Project of a New American Century. But alas due to obvious incompetency they have failed to realize much of their plans. The “New Pearl Harbor” landed right in their laps on September 11/2001. The subsequent war in Afghanistan went relatively well, but not perfectly. Now there is a lot of conspiracies, rumors attached to what happened on that fate full day, and i dare say some of them are true. A lot of critics just say that well this is all speculation, but if this is all speculation why is it that the inquiries have met such hostile oppositions from the US government and why the changing story about, or lastly why is Osama Bin Ladin not a threat??? The movie “Loose Change”, below, does through a nice, but amateur way investigates many of these exact problems. I applaud their efforts but some of their conclusions and facts are bit dubious at best.

personally i have sneeking suspicion this article will be picked up at some point by some respective authorities, maybe i am just paranoid, but well considering now that the freedom of rights in the US charter has been nerfed, and Homeland security was designed to watch its own people, and quite possibly other Federal agencies, i do not put much past the US government.

Will it blend! Wait! and theres more!

Ok you know those really crappy advertisments at those infomercials where they are trying to flog you vaccumes, or knives or what ever, and they had these cheesey lines like if you call know you will get “This limited special edition, retailed at 5oo million times more than wa are asking” Or “Wait! theres more, this vacume cleaner, can not olny dry your hair it can clean your dishes.” LIke you know what i am talking about, there are food processors that can do EVERY Thing, and really it looks like a good purchase, but really when are you going to use this item? are you even smart enough to use it for EVERY feature? really its just going to go into the cubard and collect dust like my bread maker and my food processor.  But i went to the Calgary Stampede to the round up centre and there were all the booths with stuff you see on TV

OK so there was this blender show, and this lady was handing out food from the blender, which naturally caught my attention. So this blender can make ice cream, peanut butter, ANY THING!!! So they had this blender going on the in the background where it was cooking soup, the engine will heat up the soup.  SO the company Blend Tec has this online you tube show called “Will it Blend!”

It has this awsome/cheesy fifties music, and the host has big thick classes, and all he says is, will it blend, and than puts things in there like rakes, marbles, phones, footballs, ANYTHING, and it fricken blends! While it blends there is a really bad joke of some sort, and the caption, “Do Not Try This at Home”, which just makes me want to do this at home, this blender is SO COOL! I mean you could blend, or make what ever you want, like think of the horror movie implications! Death by Blender! The only downside to these things is that they are like 500 bucks…. but still when i have the money, i want  a blender that will blend any thing!

God and Internet

I always find the question, or concept, of a some immortal being improbable That is my personal viewpoint and i do not want to impress this upon other people nor do i think that those who do believe are wasting their time. I am interested in two counter intuitive propositions, the first, is that through scientific discoveries and educations religions has be ousted from large portions of society, and that religion has been very hostile and resistant to this change. The second proposition is that the internet has facilitated to some growth in religion. i do not think that this has been taken to its full degree, like i have never heard of an online missionary who is aiming to convert only online people. but i am sure that this will eventually happen.

Back to my theme, these two propositions are both true, to a certain degree, and yet they seem conflictive. How can God have a presence in the internet, its not something He/She created. Humans created the internet, there is nothing natural about the internet, it itself is a social construction, if no one used it we would not talk about it, but it would still exists. It is amazing that we live at a time when almost everything can be accounted for by science, and if we cant, it seem probable that in near future we will be figure it out. Yet in this scientific society religion is still surviving. It has branched out with is members to the internet and made its presence felt there. Even through our innovations, and expansion of education, religion is making progress, or is growing, our culture is slowly becoming more religious. Where is my proof you ask? well lets look at the White House for a start. There are bible readings every day there, and participation is mandatory. The president frequently refers to God Almighty, and Mormanism is the fastest growing religion in North America. in some states of the US, school boards are haveing text books that say theory of evolution is just a theory, it is not fact, and motions to have Intelligent Design taught as a topic.

The theory of Intelligent Design does have some merit to it. When you find a watch for example, you do not suppose that this watch was just randomly made by nature, no you infer that a watch maker with a higher degree of complexity created the watch for a purpose, which is to tell time. So the same is extrapolated to the earth, it is so complex, it must have had a designer. Complexity is not a necessity of a creator, for example social relations are extremely complex but they had no single creator, and furthermore, there is no purpose to that. So for intelligent Design to even be logically consistent, God HAD to have designed earth with a purpose.

Now what is this purpose? well like all humans, and even the theory of evolution there is no universal consensus on what God’s purpose is. If God does have some grandiose purpose than what is his purpose for the internet? how could that possibly fit into His plan? Well the traditional response to that is, well God works in mysterious ways. Now to mean that god works in mysterious ways means that we do not understand him. If humans cannot understand him, how is it that we have his records? How can we have a bible if it is from a god we cannot comprehend or understand, would not the entire bible we discredit because oh well all those saints and such just could not understand what god was saying therefore it is meaningless.

As my philosophy professor said, philosophers and theologions  really are just arguing where the lump under the carpet is going to end up, no one can actually remove the dilemma.

The skeleton of the Internet

You know how when archaeologists look back at ancient cultures like Egypt and Babylon they find like statues of gods, and extrapolate from these papers, or these scraps of writings of how they lived. It is amazing how these scholars can pull so much, or make so much up with these minuscule findings. As for the last several thousand years texts have been the most important to our historical understanding of the past. There are countless texts that have been lost in the ages of time. Many laws of rules are not around any more, all kinds of gems are gone due to the wars of stuff. A con to books is that they can be burnt, like the libraries of Europe are subject to wars and fire. These libraries are such gems, that are so fragile that need to be replicated and preserved for our academic culture. For cultural historians and such looking back at the past can look to archeology and contemporary texts of what stuff was like. Obviously they cannot look at every aspect of medieval society because we have such limited information.

What is the internet leaving behind as evidence of our society? what happens when wars bring down the internet, and all this electronic data is lost to us, how fragile is the internet? For example what happens if there is a world electricity shortage? Will all that online information being supported by those servers be destroyed? Will historians look back at this time and say, ya the internet was a big thing in the lives of the people of the twenty first century and we have these vague conceptions of how things work. They will have to rely upon the cryptic accounts of scholars, and such about the internet, and if it does not exist any more they will have equally elaborate explanations of how our interconnected society worked like the ancient Egyptians did, or other ancient civilizations.

I just hope that some doom sayer, prepared scholar, puts much of how our society works and all of our compiled information is put into a hard copy time share, that we can store for those academics later in life.

Stress

There internet from my perspective has really just increased the pace of our society. Despite how it can make communication, information, relaxation convenient, it still is high paced. What i mean by high paced, is that we are all under deadlines, which makes things go faster, and that was have a large deal of stress. I believe western culture, and more specifically north American culture has the highest suicide rate. That is rather depressing when we are the richist culture ever to exists. Maybe that is our down fall, greed. A desire that can never be satiated, that we most always be making more money that they year before, unpresidential growth. The internet is just a symptom of this growth, this existed before the internet and before the use of computers as well.

But computers and technology has made it even more ingrained, blurring the lines between relaxation and work. How often to people go on holidays and have work follow them there, because of emails, cell phones, etc. This high pace work also affects our lives with our friends, every one is connected through cell phones and online programs like facebook, were we frantically log on to get our entertained hit.

Even my life, is just high paced, i have to schedule in friends into my life, and have limited time. I have even lost contact with friends because i have been so busy with my life. I just cannot keep up, i guess in the larger societies, and because our urban centers are so large we do change our time use. yet the alternative, is sitting on a farm and hand plowing the field ALL day trying to feed your family and rent to the rich aristocracy….

Rambling Computer Rant

I don’t know what i am doing with my life, i don’t know where i am going, i am just struggling to keep above life, consumed from one dead line to the next, barely having a minute to think to myself. I am constantly bombarded by parts of the internet, i spend the majority of my day in front a computer screen. I rush from class to class, frantically writing notes, writing papers, doing online readings. I see this technology that i interact with everyday that i take for granted, that has changed how we interact and live our lives. How new skills are to be developed and old ones discarded.

I see computers as a love hate relationship. These infernal machines can make me so made that i have the complusive urge to destroy it along with every thing else. Technology is great, untill of course it does not work. This is true of everything, even pen and paper, things are great untill your pen runs out of ink. Same with a computer, you are writing a paper on your computer and you save it and do not double check and you realise that you have lost that copy, all that hard work. Your world wavers, and your temper starts to flare, than implode into a pit of dispair when you realise no matter how much you rage, the file is gone!

Really when it comes down to it, how much has our lives improved due to these computers, has the ratio of computer use been beneficial. What about all those poor saps in cubicles doing god knows what on a computer, is their quality of life improved? Being a desk jockey any better than working at the old mill or factory. I mean at least at the old industrial establishment you had some physical exercise, mind you i am sure the boredom of each job is comparable.

New Cell Phone

So over the weekend i go a new cell phone hurray! how does this have to do this class, well my old cell phone was kinda broken and i could not write text messages, or change my settings, or do any thing excpet recieve calls. It was really irratating i would always get txt messages and than get a message saying that my memory was full and i needed to delete stuff but alas the butten than enabled me to delete those useless txt messages is now dead. Joy, so now for only another 3 year contract i have another cell phone 🙂 hurray… oh well. So my phone is a Nokia 6085, as you can see there is a large photo of my phone

I have some reservations about this cell phone, you see i am very hard on moving parts, like cell phones, my secound cell phone was a flip phone and it got ripped in half… so that kinda sucked, my first one had a fatal incounter with water, and you have already heard about my last one.

So now i can put my cell phone up on twitter, not that i am ever going to use that but its a nice touch. I was thinking of getting a nicer cell phone, but some how paying for a cell phone is really superflous to me, like its not necesssary, i just do not see the point. All i need is something to receive calls and text messages, really. I dont need some cool fancy thing with a miniture keyboard and features i will never comprehend. I do like gadgets but for cell phones i like em basic.

This one has mp3 music as well and a camera, and i doupt i will really use either feature. One day i imagine all of our gadgets will be just boiled down to our cell phones, camera, music, vidoes, pornography, vibrater, what ever people demand. Oh what is this world coming to! Soon we will just get these thing attached to the side of our heads with glasses, which can also be vidoe screens, and web cams, and ear plugs of good sound quality, and we will be eternally connected!