Two Great Tastes…

We all know, I suppose, that grief comes at us in unpredictable ways. I’ve certainly felt much sadness since my unexpected departure from St Stephen’s House — partly from giving up the work that I had expected to continue indefinitely, partly since this means I may need to leave the home I’ve grown into (Margaret and I have lived in Oxford longer together than we have lived anyplace else), partly because departure always tastes a little like death for those who know the flavour.

This morning, fresh from a lovely visit with Si and Laura and the Greatest Grandson in the World (and the impending Greatest Granddaughter) and waking up in Nate and Laura’s home, grief has hit me especially hard as it arrives riding in on the underside of our joy and thanksgiving for our spectacular family. (And we know to anticipate the same with Pippa — just aren’t there yet.) How can a man such as I not wake up every morning thrilled and broken by the tremendous weight of gratitude for all the blessings he’s been afforded?

And there are, no doubt, further blessings to come; I hope to feel such genuine grief at true losses as does not blind me to my immense privileges and opportunities, nor hinders my determination to share blessings with whomever I can, in order, so doing, to know true thanksgiving.

Blogs, Blogging, Networks, Genre

Yesterday Alan Jacobs quoted Robin Sloan’s recent post about blogs and social media and so on. Jacobs’s post mostly applauds Sloan’s (for good reason); I was struck by a couple of the points Sloan makes, that Jacobs likes.

First, Sloan observes that ‘Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable… that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.’ I’m not sure that’s quite true. In the early days of blogging, one could rely on one’s readership network to bring links to one’s attention, and their blogrolls; then in the middle age days, there were a number of mediators (Daypop, Technorati, and I vaguely recall there being at least one other — along with the venerable and still-functioning Metafilter) to call attention to Moreover, back in those pre-privacy days, one could see the sources of incoming clicks and links; these, in turn, provided earnest signs of interest from furth of one’s known circle of readers. Those days won’t come back, the state of surveillance capitalism being what it is, leaving us with few if any sources for bringing new items to our attention, so Sloan has a sound diagnosis even if I quibble about his retrospective history.

Second, Sloan obsrves that ‘Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs, about blogging.’ That sounds like a skewed perspective to me — even though my friends and I used to talk about blogging a lot, we talked about everything. In one observation that got shared around a lot, thanks to a reblog (those were like quote-tweets) from Gideon Strauss, I compared our blog circles to a vast non-spatial coffeeshop. I can’t find the quotation any more, but it concerned blogging being like a cafe, with different regulars at different tables vigorously discussing different topics. Of course sometimes we talk about the cafe, and about coffeeshops in general, and probably more than is their due proportion (given the importance of politics, ethics, films, novels, photography, and so on), but that’s fairly predictable, isn’t it?
Anyway, I like the sound of renewing, reviving, breathing fresh air into blogging — and I think that resuscitating discovery, and encouraging linking, would go a long way toward that end.