| A weblog is not only everything we think they are now—a weblog is everything we haven't even imagined they can be yet.
In other words, they're nothing more or less than whatever their authors (and, to a certain extent, their readers) allow them to be. Why would we want them to be just one thing? Why would we want to force them all into the same mold? Why would we want to say that "This is what it has to be, and this is all that it can be; you're not allowed to make more of it than this"?
Weblogging is a potentially powerful, profound and even spiritual medium of self-expression; it's also potentially the emptiest, silliest, most pretentious garbage you'll find anywhere. But as a medium, it's no more excluded from being either the former or the latter than any other creative medium. Just because it can be cheap and petty (and often is) doesn't mean it has to be; there is no "competition" here that really matters at the end of the day, except with ourselves. There may not be any limits to its awfulness, but neither are there any limits to its greatness; and wherever we fall on that spectrum is far more up to us than to any preconceived "rules" or notions of what a weblog should or shouldn't be about.
Noah Grey {noah@noahgrey.com} | |
