Wednesday, January 16, 2008

On Blogging once again

Some days back, I chanced to see `We, The People' on NDTV, a programme anchored by Barkha Dutt. The issue of the day was whether blogs should be censored. What was more interesting however was the discussion on why people blog at all. There was this obvious paen to Freedom of Expression. But what was curious was the way people express their private lives in a public domain. They would not talk about many things to their friends, but the things would appear on their blogs. Blogs give a certain amount of anonymity and allow people to hide behind their confessional screen. This can take away the inhibitions.
My own experience with the Net is lot similar, though not directly with blogs. My friends tell me that I open up a lot and I am a different person while I am chatting. I am less inhibited and flirt and say things which I would not have said during face to face meeting. You see I am very often shy.My friend says that this is a symptom of multiple personality disorder. The Net and techology can indeed proliferate identities. Digital identities can act like a maskand liberate.
In the programme, there was also discussion about various types of blogs and bloggers. Blogosphere is ahetereogenous sphere where you have all sorts of blogs and bloggers. Like a library catalogue, you can locate and access the kind you are looking for.
As I have discovered lately as a writer, that blogs can be liberating even from suffocating literary culture. Pathare's diatribe against bloody blogging postmodern poets like us can be seen as an example of the bewilderment of the establishment to the liberating potential of the new media.
Blogging can even be a challenge to the traditional publishing business in future. Publishing houses worked asnewer forms of patronage and constraints on the writer. Blogging will be a threat to the older forms of literary politics and probably give rise to newer forms of politics. What form? Lets wait and see for ourselves.

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