This is NOT a blog.

Let me start by saying this is NOT a blog. Call it a periodic-though-non-deadline-oriented online expression of my thoughts. I hesitate to call it a blog because I've generally been annoyed by all things blog as we move farther along into this digital age. (I don't even like the word blog. Blog. It sounds like the noise I make when I vomit. Blogggggg. See?) When blogs--weblogs, as they were initially christened--first started, they were great ways to keep your family updated on your life, to share pictures, etc. Hence, the 'log' part. My good wife and several of her friends have blogs, and that's what they do. They post pictures, recipes, updates for out-of-town families, swap ideas on child-rearing, and vent when the tools they're married to do something stupid. But more and more, blogs have to come to have an influence that I think is a little unhealthy.

Mind you, I think it's great that anybody can now contribute to The Conversation--it's truly free speech in action. However, I'm an elitist. You see, I believe people should have the right to express their opinions. But I also think I have the right to discount those opinions, especially if they're dumb or unduly prominent. I don't like having those opinions thrust upon me. I hate that media-types are constantly gauging the temperature of the blogosphere. (Blogosphere--isn't he the Governor of Illinois? And if there's a really hot topic in the blogosphere, would that be considered contributing to blogal warming?) I also just don't think most people's lives are that interesting or exciting that they need to chronicle every bit of minutiae for the rest of the world to see.

I kind of view blogs--what they've become, not what they were meant to be--with the same kind of disdain as I do short stories. I think people write short stories because they're not skilled enough writers to turn their ideas into opems, nor is a partiuclar idea good enough to sustain a novel. (See? Elitist.) In other words, blogs have become a medium for people who don't want to write letters to the editor, or can't write well enough to have an article published. But because they're instant (oooh!), online (aaah!), current (wow, Britney just did that!), accessible by everyone, and are a facsimilie of words on an actual page, they're often assigned an importance that just isn't warranted.

There's also a danger of blogging making the art of the verbal dance dry up. If everybody blogs in their own little way on the things they know about the most to a limited audience of people who generally already agree with them, what happens when you happen upon, in person, a topic that generates some discord? People who are used to having time to create a measured opinion, or used to tempering a short comment on somebody else's measured opinion from behind the luxury of a comfy chair and a flat panel, won't be able to do the dance. They won't be able to verbally defend or advance their position. There will be no debate. Heck, even if it's a friend's blog that stirs such a fire in you, and you don't want to offend that friend by being offended and making a comment, you have the easiest of outs: "I didn't see the entry." No such out in an actual conversation.

Further, what, at all, might be the point of face-to-face conversation anymore if everyone has a blog? Everybody's going to know everything about everybody else. You're not going to have anything to say. It's all already been expressed, commented upon and replied to. As I said to my wife the other night, in response to the fact that she and her circle of friends are all blogging: "Do you guys actually have conversations anymore? Or, when you get together, do you all bring laptops and just read each other's blogs?"

So even though I probably deserve to have my voice heard above the fray by way of crafting an influential, much-heralded blog, I'm not going to call it that. I'm too much of an elitist.