Thursday, April 15, 2004

Borgger this!

Day seems to happen again, and Night seems to at last divide the Days. We can instantly connect to anywhere on the globe, but where physical transportation between different timezones is concerned, I travel as well as a souffle.

Simultaneously I have through this ridiculous phenomenon of blogging once again returned to a congenital disposition that I have been trying to surmount through my entire life. I would rather float around in the safety of my mind, than connect to my body.

Last summer when I entered the world of the unintellectual, the manual workers, using my body and sitting in Caffs (working class cafes, not Starbucks) sharing their copies of The Sun and The Star, I had almost escaped the tyranny of verbal thought. Not entirely comfortably, I at last understood that I too was able to reach a state of existence where I had to struggle through a paragraph in a tabloid, because of the meaningless irrelevant nature of words, words, words (snooty Guardian readers take note).

Today, by comparison, I am again ignorant of my body, and preferring the ruminating meditations of a monk. This blogging phenomenon had obvious dangers that I knew from the start, as I noted in London - Where have the interesting people gone? .

As I stand on the wall peering at the vastness of the blogosphere I am wondering why I would want to live there. It would mean maintaining a blogroll, trying earnestly to be blogrolled by others, and subsisting in a community that I haphazardly encounter as I wander about the Web. I could hope to be RSS aggregated by control freaks that feel plugged in by monitoring the blog universe. This in a city where I have 6,000,000 people on my doorstep, where strangers will not even look at each other on the street or on the train.

This is terribly wrong. It is not whether I should be using LiveJournal, which would allow me to simulate a neighbourhood where friends casually drop in. It is not whether I should be using Moveable Type, which would allow my blog to dress professionally and enter the blogosphere's economy. I do not live in the white wastes of Northern Canada, or the sparsely populated deserts of Africa, or the horizonless ranches of Australia. I live in a City, with a long human history, whose once famous claim was, "If you're tired of London, you're tired of Life"

It occurred to me that it is not by curious coincidence that Blog sounds so much like Borg. (See also Love and Sex & the City). From Startrek I quote "The Borg have a singular goal, namely the consumption of technology, rather than wealth or political expansion as most species seek". So I thought, is there a www.borg.com? Is there a www.borgger.com? No, there is neither, surprisingly, but you might wish to explore www.theborg.com.

So Borgger this! I am off! An addiction is still just an addiction.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

there IS a www.borgger.com