POSTED TO BLOGGER AS FEEDBACK

How I’ve been using blogger until now.  This is feedback.

I have built a writing habit by writing 1,000 words every day, including weekends.  This habit is strong enough to trigger complex ideas in a manageable way.

The index I’ve developed is the date.  I manage what I write to be one-a-day.  BUT I am always working along a few strands addressing issues, moving from one to another:  Blackfeet; the last fifty years in this East Slope of the Rockies place; the cutting edge research on brain function; “religious” issues excluding institutions while concentrating on liturgy and ritual in all cultures; the economic and social basis controlled by the ecosystem.  Memoir creeps in.  I am NOT tagging according to the standards of techies.

I use the formal idea of a “blog” being a log of posts accessed through search engines.  I use links all the time.

In a sense I’m following the pattern of sermons as an examination of moral systems, the nature of existence, and community life.  But I don’t claim the idea of being clergy.  Instead, I see the possibility of being a “public intellectual” — that is to say someone with a “high” education who yet belongs to the local and has both the leisure and the income to be free from any obligation to an institution whether public or private.  I see this as helping to maintain the connections among all readers that guard our culture.

I have a special concern for the middle of the continent, but not the “midwest” with its specific culture of mostly white people, though both streams of my ancestors came to Oregon through the Midwest.  The maternal side had been in the US for generations.  The paternal side came from Scotland and my grandfather was educated there.  Scotland seems to be an active source of “religious” ideas that are strongly humanist.

I’m an elitist but my definition of “elite” tends to be classic academic, as affected by the radical reform of contemporary Deconstruction, and moral character, not necessarily conventional.  I think many people see blogging as just a personal or family thing, transient and for fun.  I’m much more serious.  Maybe there ought to be a label to warn readers like the one warning of X content.  When I write about sex it’s more likely to be about meiosis in cells than about how to turn your partner “on”.

I think techies who develop interfaces and blog design are not aware of nor interested in these issues.  They are obsessed with eye appeal and merchandizing.  But maybe they should explain themselves in case I don’t get their thinking.  They are as anonymous and scary as ninjas.