Ballad in Plain E

Well, here it is, my inaugural post. For a long time I resisted starting a “real” blog; I was content with my four-year-old LiveJournal, which suited me fine for (mostly) rants and (occasional) raves on all sorts of topics of a somewhat personal nature. So why’d I change my tune?

For starters, I finally decided to get serious about writing at a personal level (I’m taking a writing class at SFU) so I figure it’s about time to get serious about writing in my professional life, too. Also, the world we live in is getting too interesting not to be documented. Oh sure, there are naysayers skeptics who say “What’s wrong with keeping a paper journal, the kind you keep under lock and key?” (I believe that particular rant ended with something about a four-year-old brother hacking into said diary.) But since it has been such a pleasure and privilege to read others’ blogs, I feel that since I do have the inclination to do so, I owe it to my counterparts to contribute something to the blogosphere, not just take from it.

The first time I ever heard the word “blog”, I was enrolled in the SAIT library tech program, and it was 2002. Strangely enough, it wasn’t in one of my own classes that I heard the term. My good friend and then-roommate Marianne was studying at ACAD, and one day I sat in on one of her classes, because that day they would be discussing Christian Bok’s clever book Eunoia. The notes from the previous class’s lecture were on the board, and I noticed the word, with an explanation that it was a shortened form of “web log”. I didn’t realise for another year or two that the LiveJournal that I’d been keeping since that fall was, in fact, a blog. I started my LJ during the period when accounts were either invite-only or paid. There was, I suppose, an air of exclusivity, since you had to know someone who was willing to give you a code. Like Gmail was in the beginning. And now they’re practically liquidating them. Ubiquity.

Here what I think: good blogging takes commitment and enthusiasm, a love of writing, and then obviously something to write about. I sort of panicked about the commitment part for a bit, but now that I’ve taken the proverbial plunge, I think it’ll be ok. We live in pretty interesting times. “Ballad in Plain E”, the name of this blog, is a play on the name of one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs. “Ballad in Plain D” is both beautiful and heartbreaking, and interestingly, a song that Dylan wished he had never written and released. But there’s the rub: it can never be unwritten, and now exists for eternity. It is precisely that quality of the internet that makes it all at once appealing and terrifying. Depending on the context in which the information was created, and whatever subsequently unfolds, this clash of realities is fascinating, to say the least.

I make no such claims as to the eternal nature of my own words, but certainly hope that twenty years from now, I’ll be able to look back and see these words for what they are: a snapshot of how our world existed, in this crazy place we call “online”. And just as Dylan’s influence on popular music is incalculable, the internet’s influence on my generation is near impossible to overestimate. I’m not particularly qualified to talk about the hugeness that is the internet, nor should I spend much time trying to, since there’s plenty of great writing about that already. Nevertheless, working in the library field makes it possible to explore the information, business, and social aspects of the internet in ways that are more intimate than say, online banking, and more involved than oh, I don’t know…checking out weather.com.

So, thanks to all the great bloggers out there who said “no lock, no key” and let the world in on their thoughts and ideas on everything from crappy fonts to workplace politics and everything in between. I salute you and proudly join your ranks!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 10:28 pm and is filed under You know....stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.