Overly Positive

I’m stealing a post topic that’s stealing another post topic by referring you folks to Ysharros and her post a few days ago about why she blogs for the internets. In the face of the rise of blogging and how it has helped geeks and non-geeks alike with putting forth popular opinion, I thought it would be nice to talk about.

The fact that there are many folks like Ysharros and HZero that do blog, and blog not for a grander community or loftier goals, but for themselves and their opinion, is a heartening thing for communications on the Internet. Why do I say this? I think that the beauty of the Internet itself when it comes to people and what they think is in the dissonance of its collective voice. While sometimes the disagreements on the internet lead to inevitable pages and pages of flames that would cause the best of us to facepalm, it is in that disagreement and variety of opinion that I think we find some insight. Not every discussion over the internet is a world-shaking piece of dialog (“ur mom” never really taught me much of anything except that I have a mom, which I knew) but if you know where to look to engage in talk that you enjoy, you won’t be disappointed.

Blogs are just dedicated places that add to the voice. It’s part of why I do mine, really – there’s a lot of the negative nancy and the snark out there. While that usually makes for higher traffic and more comments, I think I’d rather write in a way that comes naturally to me. I’m an optimist, and usually see the good or silver lining in the worst thunderclouds. I’d dare to say that my kind of tolerance for the bumps and bruises of geek media is a rarity today, where people can get upset over something as small as a coloring or a single powerpoint slide. As a result, I command a significantly smaller reader base (at times, I’m not even sure if many people are paying attention at all), but I think that’s a small price to pay for adding what I think is a small, yet necessary voice to that of the internet.

There’s also the therapeutic nature of blogging that I think that people forget about, and which even Ysharros and HZero might not have touched upon. Regardless on whether you write about sunshine and puppies rolling over for the first time like me, or you rant about the stupidity of people who have no concept of the word “respect”, afterwards, most bloggers who continue to blog feel fulfilled and satisfied in some way. I don’t really tend to write about my personal life, but I can say that like any human being, I’m not always a positive person, which is, by the way, a big difference from having a positive outlook. During the more difficult times in my life, the blog, such as it is these past three years or so, has been a way to excise bad feeling. Today is no different than then.

Ultimately, the really great thing about the marriage of discourse to internet media is the fact that it’s pretty much an inexhaustible resource, and always ripe for innovation. Blogging has obviously proven its value far beyond its initial mockery of being a glorified diary – it’s an exchange of opinions, a flashpoint-in-time archive of sometimes emotional reaction to the topics of the world, and to most of us blogger folks, good clean fun. I look forward to much more positive posting in the future, even though I’ve had my lulls – and I look forward to reading all of you out there who write, as well.