Fame, Money, The Common Good - or why I blog
As you can see in my page about me, Andrew, I can’t honestly say that I blog for purely altruistic reasons. It isn’t just that something happened that I want to remember (I do have something vaguely like a private diary for that), nor is it just for a specific agenda (such as many war/anti-war blogging sites are). No, I’ll be honest, I blog for several reasons:
- I blog for fame. So I love it when I get mentioned from someone else’s blog. Especially when it is good (IMHO), but even when it is just somewhat good. Why do I blog for fame? I’ll address that later.
- I blog for money. I thought that if I put enough suitable affiliate links in, that I’d get enough money that maybe this website would start to pay for itself. This will take a while before that happens, but it is beginning, as one article has, through search engine results alone, brought me a potential $20 (when the darn thing that I linked to actually starts to ship). Why blog for money? Because, quite frankly, after listening to oodles of people that have never done it say what it takes to make a successful e-commerce site, I figured I’d just find out for myself. I’m beginning to realize a few things, such as that ContentDrivesVisitors, but I’m certain I’ve got a lot more to go.
- I blog for the common good. This isn’t some illusion that I’m going to decidedly make the world a better place for sure. Instead, this is something that it integrated substantially with why I blog for fame. I’ll explain more later on in this article.
Suppose I support some wonderful idea about how humanity can better itself. Clearly, the idea is useless unless I can make it a reality (or somehow use it to realize a benefit to humanity). Clearly also, the days when a single person with absolutely no one else supporting them could make a difference with their one wonderful idea are gone, if, indeed, they ever did exist. The difference that one person makes is the difference that they make on other people.
This then explains the “I blog for fame”. I blog because I want to have an audience so that I can have my idea have the best change it can get and hit the ground running. Hitherto so far, my WikiBlogIntegration idea has had better luck than my theories about SocialParasites (such as prairie dogs), but it has had more time to digest in the realms of people and search engines.
Now, you ask, the “common good”, where is this represented in my blogging? Well, you see, I think that there’s a lot of ways the world can be made a better place, and a lot of it has to do with understanding how it got this way (read the EvolutionaryReasoningDisclaimer) as well as where it might be going (by and large what this category - Techonology, Society, and the Individual - is all about, but some of what Science Fiction - Or Not? is about as well).
Once we gain an understanding of how we got where we are and where we might be going, we can get a better idea of how we perhaps ought to change things so that the vision of where we are going can be improved appropriately. I know lots of people have their opinions about where we ought to be going. I just intend to give them long-term extrapolations about how things might go if they continue on their path. Will my guesses be wrong sometimes? Yes, probably - but you won’t know until you wait all of eternity, because I often don’t predict specific time frames for when things may occur. To me, it doesn’t matter - the mere fact that they are plausible is sufficient, IMHO, for people to look it and themselves in the eye and say “is this what I want? by golly no!” and then go and do something about it (or, alternatively, “is this what I want? by golly yes!”, and then make sure that things stay on that course).
I deal with technology. A lot. Perhaps too much. So most of what I blog about will have a technical bent to it. But I won’t often blog about just something technical - I’ll often blog about the social ramifications of it. Not because I’m “interested” in it - I’m interested in thinking about it. I’m certain other people have thought about it more, extrapolated from previous technological innovations, and this probably forms the body of knowledge about such things that exists in academia when people write on such a subject. I’m not interested in studying their ideas - I’m interested in thinking about them on my own. (Now sometimes I am interested in studying other people’s ideas, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.)
Ultimately, I feel that to discuss the society without discussing the role of the individual in society is like saying that every cell of a human could die all at once and the human could physically remain alive.
So, there’s a little “why I blog” and how “fame”, “money”, and “the common good” all inter-relate as far as that goes. I encourage other people to blog for the exact same reasons - albeit their notion of “the common good” may be a bit different. That’s fine by me. At least for now.
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Ultimately, I feel that to discuss the society without discussing the role of the individual in society is like saying that every cell of a human could die all at once and the human could physically remain alive.
Preach on, Andrew. Preach on!