Monday, November 13, 2006

Blogging: Perhaps I'm Just Too Old

This site has just come to my attention. It consists of cartoons of various bugs with brief descriptions of what they do - like, for example, kill you. It is currently one of the big blogs of the world. It is beautifully done by an Australian student. But it is so odd, so strange, that it raises questions like, what do blogs do, what are they for? The answers 'anything you like' and 'everything' seem inadequate. I suppose the technology creates an open landscape in which oddities like this are bound to appear and, for a time, thrive. But is it really that open? Aren't such things inventions of the technology itself? But, hey, what do I know? The young are different.
Posted by Bryan Appleyard at 7:14 am

8 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 13, 2006 9:59 am

    Very educative Bryan. I've already got the bleach and hoover out....a tissue! The cartoon germs are great, clearly the young Aussie has a future.

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  2. James HighamNovember 13, 2006 1:02 pm

    Bryan, this is a question much on my mind. I see blogs like yours and they're informative and a bit quirky, which is to my taste and then you go to some blog call Yazza or Ben-e-boi and they're using Valley-speak or some lexical concoction and these blogs have huge traffic. One wonders.

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  3. Bryan AppleyardNovember 13, 2006 1:07 pm

    Thanks, Cap'n. I suppose, James, it is all about how we perceive blogs, as extensions of ordinary discourse or as something quite new which extends itself into areas of entertainment, goofy gags etc. It is all these things and that Aussie bug blog is one of the best of its type. But, like you, I wonder where it will all go.

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  4. AnonymousNovember 13, 2006 3:27 pm

    I think the bug blog is great! Especially because The End of the World as We Know It is likely to come via a deadly plague. I do believe the Australian is a prescient fellow; his little drawings are the equivalent of those dancing skeletons back in the days of the Black Death.

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  5. Bryan AppleyardNovember 13, 2006 3:34 pm

    Unless Emma is an Oz useage I have not previously come across, I think it's a she, Susan. The Black Death analogy seems sound. The medieval danse macabre was intended to show death as the great leveller. This, I suppose, indicates we are one with the bugs.

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  6. AnonymousNovember 13, 2006 8:45 pm

    I stand corrected, with apologies to Miss Emma. I was so busy looking at the little drawings, I didn't bother to look at the name of their originator.

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  7. Ms BaroqueNovember 13, 2006 9:37 pm

    You can't be THAT old!

    The way I see it, blogs are like notebooks. You make one and you have a lot of blank pages to fill. We fill them with one thing; kids fill them with another. I'm sure the traffic they get is from other kids, bewcause kids use the internet all the time (whereas we occasionally still look things up in a book) and kids like that sort of thing. There do seem to be an awful lot of blogs run by 14-year-old girls from Hong Kong, too, have you noticed? They seem very satisfied with little outbursts of teen slang and pictures of fluffy pink kitties like what we used to paste onto our exercise books. (Only once your mom is paying for the broadband, blogs are even cheaper than exercise books...)

    Having said this, I have not yet seen this amazing bug blog and it may in fact turn out to be something utterly confounding. Dear me.

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  8. NewscomaNovember 13, 2006 11:06 pm

    Blogs are funny. The innertubes can tell you how to make a pipe bomb (scary) or you can light a candle for peace.
    It amazes me (and I'm 41 years old.)
    It's such a giddy, trippy community and you can fine whatever you like. And you can talk to people an ocean away.
    Of course if we could just find Bigfoot...
    *sigh*

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