The Final Days
Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.
According to the Status Center, this blog will go offline on Tuesday evening. For forty bucks I could continue for another year, but the time has come to move on.
Blogging is a low-risk, low-reward activity. It costs basically nothing to do, which is no doubt explains why there are millions of them out there. Leaving out a few prominent blogs like Andrew Sullivan's, I would hazard to guess that most people who read blogs are bloggers themselves. It is truly an echo chamber.
On the plus side, blogging is a lot of fun. No matter how tiny your audience, you feel like you are part of a vast conversation... I just spent about ten minutes looking for my disintegrating copy of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. One of the central symbols of the novel is a giant library, and toward the end Eco offers the epiphany that the books in the library are full of references to other books in the library, and are therefore engaged in a conversation, one that takes place over a time scale of centuries. A blogger participates in such a conversation, vastly sped up.
It is tempting to think of this blog as one volume in a library, but that doesn't quite work because it is going to be offline. It will continue to exist only on my hard disk, where only a highly determined hacker could possibly find it. This is fitting, however. Rapid conversation implies rapid decay. If newspapers are ephemeral, blogs are hyper-ephemeral. Dust in the wind.
A comforting thought: Although our media may be more transient, we have the same brains as the monks in The Name of the Rose. Human memory lasts longer than RAM and hard disks. The traces of the conversation will persist.
Goodbye, my friends.
Woody Mena
P.S. I'll still check my mail once in a while.
1:10:10 PM 
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