Thursday, July 22, 2010

If a tree fell and nobody blogged about it would you still hear about it on twitter?

This last weekend IOP took a much needed break from digitizing the last 4 years of our lives and watched a movie. Little did I consider that the film would in fact revolve around the very same concept. If you haven’t seen it - the movie Julie and Julia is about how writing a blog can destroy everything it touches – including people, books and food from the past.

Luckily since we employ no professional writers here - the titanic powers of the blog are muted at best, but the movie still left me with a self-loathing ennui that only someone with a blog can truly fathom. After all as the movie proved thoroughly via fiction- today we can blog it, photograph it and lay it out so nicely - but who or what going to put substance into our lives? Titans of the past? Us? LOL cats?

Since we at IOP have not done much to destroy culture in the past few years – I spent a little time thinking about where the true blame might fall.

Who made the idea of typing some nonsense on the computer equal to saving a life or translating French cooking into a vernacular Americans could understand?


Who indeed …and then it came to me in a flash – I know the first time I saw someone pecking out their most intimate thoughts onto the glowing screen of a computer monitor. I know who encouraged us all to take the grand events of a real life and encapsulate it into a few quips to never fade away. Season after season he brought us closer to the brink of mass self projection and perhaps we should recognize him now for what he has done.


Doogie Howser brought us the blog and thus perhaps our ruin.

I trusted him - we all did - because he after all was a genius child doctor.

Now I just don’t know what to think every time I read:
  • A blog about Japanese biker gangs riding vintage American motorcycles in Japan posted in American blogs about Old school motorcycling in America.
  • A blog linking to a site offering us all the ability to dress EXACTLY like Mel Gibson in the Road Warrior.
  • A blog about someone’s house - on the other side of the planet - that is way cooler than your house will ever be.

Frankly it scares me – Why? Because I love it all too much and I think you might feel the same way.

Perhaps as penance we should ask Neil Patrick Harris to write & sing us a song about the heavy burden of the invention of blogging


Perhaps that would ease the imbalance I sense in the universe.



Hiram Kneesch *transcribed from a text via Bruce McClure



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