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August 12, 2005
Shallow diary
Technically I'm a professional writer.
As I write that, the image I get is one of God up there wiping a tear of laughter from the corner of His eye, never tiring of this long and painful slapstick comedy.
My readers are not laughing. Most are wondering why it is so long, what we used to do at work before email, and how come technical documentation got to be such an enormous haystack with most of the needles missing.
Let me remind you this is how I put food on the table.
From time to time, I hear from people who feel they might want to blog, but cannot quite get started. Some are afraid they will have to learn lots of complicated technical detail. (Not true) Others are afraid they will not have anything to say. (In that case, as Wittgenstein would advise: Take a vow of silence.)
Some worry what they have to say is not earth shattering enough. Perhaps not. Not all of us feel lack of verbal profundity is a sound reason to stop writing, since writing things down is a good way to figure out precisely what we should have been trying to say. Not only that, but also most of us start out so far from perfect that almost any practice makes better, even writing email.
Yet, okay. Let us say you have a point there, that by starting your very own online diary, you might be adding more noise than signal to the World Wide Web.
As Jean-Paul II said, "Be not afraid." The signal-to-noise ratio out on the web is so low you cannot make it worse. Google claims now to be "Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages." If you add a few thousand, no one will notice, except maybe your three friends, your mother, and God.
And He'll get another big kick out of your hubris.
Posted by Mark at August 12, 2005 09:32 PM