u l t r a m o o k i e

Years ago I started to keep an online diary of tech stuff and my daily grumblings. I am surprised to see how the web has changed the publishing world, for me and for others on the Internet. If you’ve been in a hole for the last few months, you’ve missed out on a new revolution in publishing called “blogging”, which is short for “weblogging”. I am surprised to see how blogging has really caught on with so many individuals and I am very happy to see its tremendous growth.

Blogging is a revolution that puts the power of publishing in the hands of the individual. Blogging lets the individual take their writings and publish them online quickly and efficiently. There are so many blogging tools out there that it is hard for someone not to be able to blog. Blogging has gained an almost religious following with people who write and edit on their blogs on a daily basis. I am sure that there are people who follow blogs on a daily basis also. This is great since it brings publishing to an individual level. No longer does and individual have to have an agent and publisher in order to be heard. Everyone can be heard, no editors to filter out stuff, just pure personal writing.

Some may argue that this kind of mass publishing will bring loads of garbage to the Internet and in the end it will be hard to filter out the gems from the trash. I subscribe to that thought, but I also think that the gems will always shine, that the good stuff will always find its way to the top of the stack and the mediocre stuff will fall away. That is the beauty of the Internet.

The lost of the editor may have bigger consequences though, since I still think that they are still needed in some capacity until people start to write and read better. Our society has become illiterate because of all the passive ways of entertainment. Yes, what I am referring to is TV and the movies. But, it is also the general laziness of the public who would rather sit through a three-hour movie than read the book that the movie is based on.

For a long time I’ve been mumbling about how our society has become a mass of illiterate idiots who can’t read. But what’s worse is that our society cannot write a sentence to save their ass in a jam. I am always terribly dismayed in my workplace when I have to proofread “engineering” material that my co-workers write up. Installation manuals, quick start guides, and even emails are all badly written. There is no care or, sadly, pride taken in the stuff written. The worse is emails. I cannot understand why people believe that because it is an email it means that once can write bad English.

I blame this illiteracy on our school system, but I think there is a deeper cause. I know that the more I read, the better I write. It is just a given, the more of something that one sees, the more comfortable they are with it, the more that they instinctively recognize the patterns. It is not about memorizing the rules of English, but it is about seeing English more often. This helps in the recognition of the patterns of what is right and what is wrong. But, all of that is lost if the person does not apply it on a daily basis. It is a vicious circle, if you don not read, you cannot write. If you cannot write, you cannot read.

The thing about blogging that makes me so happy is that there are so many individuals out there that are writing. Some are even writing well. They are taking the time to edit, proofread and polish their work. It is nice to see that there are still individuals that care about English. I wish that more people would take the time to write, even personally without posting to the web in a blog. And since there are people writing, there is obviously people reading and it is nice to see that people are actively engaging in a symbiotic writer/reader relationship on the Internet because of blogging.