Why Blog?

Before I start writing on "cities and everything in them", it seems appropriate to meditate for at least a moment on this community, this hallowed ground, this blogspot. In terms of blogs, I would guess that I am fairly late to the party, but still probably on the trailing edge of early adoption, in the sense that not every grandmother has a blog quite yet. Let me retrace my incipient interest in blogs (leading to this one).

Around 2000-1, like everyone else in the world, I thought about starting a website. Not like everyone else, though, I thought about starting one devoted to my idiosyncratic interests in cities. Unfortunately, since I wasn't really interested in making money, and since I didn't have a wife who collected Pez dispensers (as did the founder of Ebay), there wasn't much stimulation to act on this.

I also once dated a web diarist, who had been writing her diary on the web since college in the mid-90's, making it one of the longer-running web diaries. I liked her stories about the community of people and friends that she had developed, but it seemed to require a lot of web experience and technology (or at least friends equipped with this). Sometimes, when we were talking, she would tell me stories that I had already read before on the Internet. This was slightly weird. Most importantly, however, I myself don't have much use for putting my personal thoughts and life on the web. It is the Internet, for godsakes! In general, I'm not fascinated by a lot of personal web blogs, which seem to me variously either overly ironic, confessional, self-aware, self-conscious, self-absorbed and/or just plain boring. (By the way, this is not a comment on my ex-girlfriend's web blog -- but I have to think about whether she might read it -- see?)

Last fall, the main news outlets seemed wildly interested in political blogs, which despite their informal tone and up-to-the-minute news-breaking, simply didn't interest me very much at the time. I was rapidly fatigued by the amount of election coverage, as I am during most presidential elections, and I usually end up trying to limit my intake of articles, if only because there are significant diminishing returns in learning, and because half of the articles are about a candidate who makes me angry, anyway. Also, I like my news filtered and edited, thank you, and I don't live in fear of the hegemony of the mainstream media. (Maybe I should be, but then again, it is rapidly eroding anyway) Mostly, however, as much as I like the idea of writing something light like wonkette.com, I find it hard to make time consistently for websites that are mostly style.

One particular development that really interested me over the last winter, though, was chatting with a friend of a friend at a birthday party, as we were talking about the news, or weather, or whatever, when he mentioned that he only reads "right-wing blogs and economics blogs". I was mildly interested (and amused) by his justification for this, that "blogs are interesting because they're written largely by experts in the field, and not stupid journalists". Though our subsequent conversation went downhill, this was actually kind of refreshing, and also reminded me of something I noticed in the Wall Street Journal online. It had begun to host occasionally well-known economics weblog writers, such as ArgMax or else Knowledge Problem. After looking at them, I thought that here were two blogs that I'd like to read more often, that were well-written, frequently-read, and connected to other interesting sites. Also, I kept on coming across interesting blogs on environmental issues, such as Sustainablog, Worldchanging.org or GristMill.

I did have, however, a technology problem with the time involved in blog surfing and reading. Most mornings I barely got through the New York Times, and despite my interest in reading the Guardian, Boston Globe, Washington Post or LA Times, there is no way that you can really get any work done by starting your day by trying to read five papers thoughtfully everyday. Luckily, finding a good RSS newsreader such as NetNewsWire has really changed idle surfing back to the more conscious act of reading.

I've also been consciously trying to expand my reading over the past few years, and now it seems like there is a galaxy of blogs on every topic, ranging from politics to food to travel to sex (many, too many blogs here), to gadgets to computers, and finally (finally!) to a reason to read Wired magazine. Technology seems to have advanced to the point where any fool (like me) can start a blog, using any number of tools.

The final step taking me to this blog is a recent career change to teaching and writing. As I sit down to write longer pieces, I've become very conscious of the fact that good thinking requires active reflection. Writing consistently is an old-fashioned way to engage in reflection, even as this new technology evolves towards instantaneous publication. It's an experiment, for now.

Welcome to my new blog. I hope you like it, and I would welcome any comments.