What is in Kelvin's Head?

Bloggers come and bloggers go

30/06/2012
It seems to me that the blogging world is changing at the moment. It seems as though there has been a slow down in the number of people starting new blogs and those who are keeping them may be keeping them slightly less often.

Twitter and Facebook updates (which are a form of micro-blogging) have superseded the one-line, one-thought blog post of yore and now people seem more likely to crank up their blog when they’ve got something significant to say rather than making posts morning, noon and night.

I think we are seeing some folk give up the habit too. That’s not really surprising. Bloggers come and bloggers go. The ones most likely to last seem often to be those who were early adopters – those who came to the blogging banquet early and have been sharing their wares for the longest time.

A lot of commenting has gone on to Facebook and twitter too. I’m so lucky to have people congregating around this blog who sometimes want to have a conversation. That’s often what keeps me going. I know that a blog works best when it stimulates a community though that does not stop it being a performance event.

I regret the move towards commenting on Facebook in some ways – often I post something here and post a link to in on Facebook to drive people to read it and then the conversation happens over there in semi-private rather than over here in public. I kind of understand why that happens but it is a sadness sometimes that people are not prepared to stand up and say good things out loud.

Trends I expect in blogging in the future –
- more blogs moving to longer blog posts
- more blogs moving to slightly less frequency
- better ways of linking the community element of blogging to Facebook and Twitter
- those who do make the effort to blog through this time will become even more influential in their sphere
- increasing attention being paid to quality of writing
I can’t quite make my mind up where we are going with video. I don’t think the videoblogging phenomena has much energy in it but suspect that being able to make and post video easily is increasingly a part of the story.

What do you think?
blogging

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

Reply
kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

Reply
kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

Reply
Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

Reply
Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

Reply
RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

Reply
Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

Reply
Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

Reply
Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

Reply