further explorations on the nature of writing

Why do we write? A previous issue of the backseat dared to answer this question. In all honesty i feel i haven’t exhausted all the answers yet to this age-old question that plagued the great philosophers of the olden times. I do not posit the idea that this humble writer is in the same league as them for daring to tackle this issue. I am not. Perhaps, my old teachers from the faraway land of Diliman might even laugh at the sheer ambitiousness of this project should they ever stumble upon this blog; that might be the case if the technology of blogging ever reaches the doorstep of the great Malaya Ronas; but since his presence is not yet felt in the many circles i have chosen to make my presence known, i think its fairly safe to assume that whatever arguments i might put forward will be taken in and examined by lesser beings than the great Malaya; the gentle philosopher can safely spread his wings without fear of persecution for now. Hehehehe.

As with the previous issue, we will attempt to narrow down the coverage of this issue’s discussion to the fairly recent technological phenomenon called blogging—the seamless marriage of the human brain and the binary digits that make up the digital world. Web logs, or blogs as they have become popularly called by the netizens who practically live most of their waking lives connected with each other in cyberspace, are increasingly becoming more and more the “it” tools for broadcasting to a large number of subscribers or followers—people who have taken interest in one’s daily travails—bits and pieces of real-time information taken in as facts. More and more, we encounter a slew of sites that do not cater to niche blogging, but which rather choose to be more versatile and spontaneous with their topics; entries may range from the mundane—like pops fernandez’s tacky billboard image that the mikaela aesthetic center third party contractors concocted, to the more serious ones—like a blogger’s opinion on the reproductive health bill, or charter change.

Further narrowing down our discussion as much for the brevity of this treatise as for the benefit of the limited understanding of this blogger, we turn to the concept of image—the online persona that develops over the course of a given period, one blog entry at a time. this online persona—the representation of the person maintaining the blog through his accounts in words, pictures and sometimes, even moving images—can run parallel with what is actually existing in the realm of the real; or can run in a totally different direction by being completely fabricated, a feat that can be achieved by supplying false information and other images culled from already existing sources in the internet, completely repackaged to pass as original content generated by the owner. Such clever manipulation already runs the path of diabolical machinations—misleading one’s intended reader for purposes we can only surmise.

to be continued...