Bloggers, Bloggers everywhere

A lot of Sri Lankan people do seem to have blogs these days.

This is a good trend in a way; I loved the time back in 80'ies, when a typical Sri Lankan mother's occational gifts to a child were mostly books. Eighties ended up as the last decade where words as sequences of letters had a good place in the world of information. Then along came the age of TV and printed words were replaced gradually, and words became air vibrations that comes out of some idiots mouth, picked up by a microphone, converted to electrical - then electomagnetic - signals to be transmitted and then reproduced by thousand speakers miles away. People gave up reading, and writing was something the elite did; not much different from the medieval Europe, not really different in the mindsets of the authors anyway: they were posh, rich, had nothing to do because they didn't have to work to earn a living. Their prose and verse common people didn't read; their culture common people couldn't digest. The few young authors who were at grassroots level either produced garbage or were limited to science magazines.

And 90's was a nightmare.

If you were not aware, I must inform you that I'm an old-style guy, and that I prefer writing to speaking and reading to watching (despite the Derridian ideas that in the days of socretes this was the other way around) and that I have rather romantic notions on literary creaions as works of art, despite what Walter Benjamin said.

In this context, it's a great thing to see that a good number of people are back in writing. But is everything fine? I'm afraid not.

Male bloggers, by this I mean the few of them I happen to have noticed, talk about stuff that matters. Whether they're Sri Lankan or not, there's something to read in almost any male blog. Most female Sri Lankan bloggers, in contrast, write about themselves: mostly, what happened to them each day and why they have to bitch about that. Of course I'm talking about the few blogs I've been pointed to by various people; I did take my time to voluntarily check out some blogs of people from Singapore - where a great majority of the bloggers happens to be female - the reason I know why, but that's something out of the topic today - the relevent point is, they are just whining and bitching to such an extent that can make even Sri Lankan blogger girls would get bored. Hey, don't take this personally: critisism is an okay habit only if it's constructive. Analytical critisism is good for the world. But if you don't question, if you just whine, it's just annoying.

In Blah, Blah, Blog (IEEE Spectrum, December 2003), these kind of blogs were reffered to as kittyblogs, because - somewhat metaphorically - what they generally describe is what the cat dragged in today, or bloggerel (from blog-doggerel), or, better yet, blogorrhea (you can guess this), because they provide a pour of words, usually oversharing one's own daily life accounts.

I'm not questioning the freedom of speech in any way - so don't come up with that bashing me: I'm just using my own freedom of speach. I'd rather that female bloogers wrote something interesting outside the topic 'me'. I don't think it's wholly due to girly nature: look at this girl for instance :)