Handwritten version of this post
It's been ten years since I started blogging. It wasn't this blog and I didn't call it blogging at first, but that's what it was. I was writing directly online, where anyone could read my words - which were published in reverse chronological order. Everything about this new medium excited me back then.
Now I'm excited by the act of writing this post on paper, in long hand with a fountain pen. It seems almost subversive.
This form of writing is not new to me - not exactly. I've been using word processors for writing since I was in grade 6. Back then I was an early adopter - the first kid in my class to hand in a piece of creative writing printed by a jagged dot matrix printer.
Since then I've done most of my writing on computers. I've liked it and it's seemed to work for me. The only exceptions have been my diaries which I started in 1988 and stopped ten years ago, in 2002, when I started blogging.
I've been thinking if I'd like to blog during every day in June, as I did (well, tried) last year. I won't. For one thing, I'm getting married on June 6 and after that I'll be on a honeymoon for a couple more weeks. It's going to be a busy time. I'll probably be connected to the internet via my iPhone for most of my travels, and so it would be possible to do something. But I think I'll keep an old fashioned travel diary and send the occasional tweet.
2012 is proving to be a very big year.
- I've had not just a job change but a career change
- One of those scary milestone birthdays
- Getting married
- And now, a strong questioning of the method of writing which has underpinned my blogging for the last ten years
I've just finished reading the Shallows. I found it both insightful and disturbing. Its premise resonated for me. I had hoped that it would end with some ideas about how to constructively deal with the situation we're in. Maybe it was the author's intention that each reader should contemplate these things for him/herself.
My initial reaction is that it's pointless to consider turning back the clock to how things were 20 years. No, that's crazy neo-Luddite talk. I'm more interested in reaching some balance in how I personally engage with the internet. I would like to relearn different ways of writing and thinking which don't involve internet-connected computers, tablet devices or smart phones. I could never imagine abandoning those devices, but I'd like not to be so completely dependent on them.