In college I remember the campus minister asking a group of us what we’d be giving up for Lent. One guy said he wasn’t going to give up anything for Lent. The campus minister responded, “Well, why don’t you just give up being Christian for Lent?”
So one year during seminary I decided to try it. And I guess it just stuck.
WASHINGTON, DC—Maintaining his hardline stance against Saddam Hussein, President Bush ordered Iraq to fully dismantle its military before the U.S. begins its invasion next week. “U.S. intelligence confirms that, even as we speak, Saddam is preparing tanks and guns and other weapons of deadly force for use in our upcoming war against him,” Bush said Sunday during his weekly radio address. “This madman has every intention of firing back at our troops when we attack his country.” Bush warned the Iraqi dictator to “lay down [his] weapons and enter battle unarmed, or suffer the consequences.” (From The Onion).
Earlier I talked about the conflicts between two pro-globalization movements: globalization-from-above and globalization-from-below. The blogosphere is clearly a protagonist in the globalization-from-below movement. With Google buying Blogger and Dr. Pepper starting a blog, all this could change, of course.
Now that blogging is big time, bloggers are thinking more about what blogging “means.” The Happy Tutor over at Wealth Bondage pointed me to the heart of a blogging symposium on the ethics of blogging, a conversation I had only slightly overhead previously. After reading several excellent posts, the crux of the debate seems to be the commodification of blogging and what that says about questions of authenticity. Is the blogger for real or a poser?
Tom Coates leads a thorough discussion at PlasticBag.org. Blogging is usually free or cheap. But, says Tom, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and you pay with the soul of your site – the place you’ve carved out as a place of personal expression becomes yet another platform to sell rich teenagers Nike shoes…” The blogosphere is not free; there are dozens of hidden costs. The only thing in this world that does come perfectly free is sunlight (with a nod to Georges Bataille). And even then you have to be careful about too much of a good thing.
Click to continue reading “Blogging, ethics, and moolah”
You heard it here first: “grinning like a feral chipmunk.” I can’t wait to call my mother.
I hadn’t realized that « Previous Entries
» Next Entries
