Subject/Object

I’ll tell you one thing about not having a computer:

I kinda don’t miss reading my feeds.  Sure, I am interested in what everyone has to say–the small blogs for their individual life stories, and the large blogs for the cool things I am shown which I might have not discovered otherwise.  But today, as I got up before work and drank coffee, I skipped my usual routine of the Gmail -> Globe and Mail – > Google Reader – > Slashdot -> Arts and Letters Daily.

What I did instead is get up at 6:45 and read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the morning sun.  Sure, the book is not all that ground breaking, and it is most surely a book for hippies, but I will finished it in a day and I am enjoying it all the same.  So I read for a few minutes, shuffled off to get coffee down the street, shuffled back and sat in my chair while the cat moved throughout the room to sleep, following the spots the sun made on the floor as it rose.

And while I was reading I was thinking, something I don’t think I do as well when reading on the Internet.  I was thinking quite a few things, but when I finished to go to work I thought this: my morning was more enjoyable then it had been in a long time.  I didn’t really miss anything by not getting the news from its various sources both traditional and from the blogsphere.  I put off reading my feeds until I got to work, and I was fine with that.

But not only was I fine with it, but when I did get to work I was less interested in what they had to say.  Just looking over the titles, the posts seemed meritless, often recycled, and despite objections from the community, more dead to me then the oldest books I have on my shelf; Pirsig in his book mentions the Tao-Te-Ching, and I almost put down his book to pick up my own copy just from the force of its life there on the shelf.

So why is it, despite all the potential for debate and interaction and giving works “life” that dead, cold, fixed traditional books lack, do I find blogs so lifeless?  Why do they inspire less re-reading, debate, or commentary then a great origial piece of formal writing?  Why do they seem so recycled and derivative?  How come I have no desire to go back to a great post, even the best of blog posts, but yet Eastern monks and Western hippies still re-read the Tao-Te-Ching two or three thousand years later?  And how come if the devil held the entirety of the blogsphere in the past and the future in his left hand, and all of the copies of Plato’s Complete Works in his right, I would gladly toss blogs out the window?

Perhaps I am aristocratic, a label I will accept if it can be proven to be true.  But I don’t feel like I am, at least in the sense where I think I am better, or others cannot see what I see.  Maybe I am too anachronistic, too wedded to the old media.  At the same time I grew up with computers, feel comfortable with them and have had a web presence of some sort or another for over 10 years.  I see how the media is changing things, and I see its potential, but things get fuzzy when I read the actual sentences word-for-word.  Or, another way, I see the justification for all the buzz about the way things are progressing, but in the end, I think that we are making too much of “the medium is the message” — I cannot be all the message, because when I get down to it, I find the focus on the medium is somehow masking the lack of message. 

Perhaps I see these posts in the wrong way: they are not extended treatments of a topic, or even essays, but sentences in a debate that is happening in a way that is closer to real time then printed works could ever aspire to.  Then why do I find the debate pedantic, superficial (in terms of topic as well as in terms of depth on serious topics), and uninspired?

And, because you cannot question a media in the media without irony, why I am writing this here?  Does it betray the fact that I actually do endorse blogs, or is it because I have no other voice right now?  Any answers?