Hi there, I'm Jo
.
This will be my first ever blog post, on my first ever blog.
I have never written a blog before. I have written a lot online and on paper. I have been writing poetry for over 2 decades, writing is something I enjoy. I have, however, been in a bit of a creative and writing funk for the last few years, uni definitely made an impact in that, you don't have the same time or energy to expend on creative projects when you are balancing your own physical and mental health with being at university.
I have been thinking about writing a blog for a while now, I have also started a few other projects, including my own autobiography, and I have got back into writing poetry again.
I spend a lot of time online, whether on various social media platforms or for the business and I enjoy interacting with other people, but as someone who has both an anxiety disorder and agoraphobia, I find that social interaction for me consists mostly of online interaction. So my writing has adapted, as I have, and I tend to write what could be entire blog posts in other forums which don't quite have the format for them.
This blog is not anything special, I don't have a professional editor, or special software or anything else; we don't have the resources for anything like that, it's just me. So if this all looks very basic, it's because it is. I am using the tools at my disposal, and those are limited tools and limited resources.
A lot of the issues I like to discuss are complicated and sometimes sensitive, I find these to be the most interesting and often the most in need of being discussed in more depth. My interests are varied, but I have a keen interest in mental health, inequality, psychology and sociology and most of the issues I like to discuss are centered around these in some way.
I intend this to be not only a place for me to air my thoughts, but also for you to air yours. You can disagree or agree as you want, I encourage the discussion, this is exactly why I created the blog. This is a space for you to read, converse, listen and be heard.
I think we have a lot of social interaction and forums dedicated to this, I'm sure we all use them, but how often can we say we were able to have a really well thought out discussion, or really think about something? or, and possibly the most important aspect, how often can we say we felt we had really been heard?
Everything online is designed to be as fast as possible, this is not what I want for this blog. I want us to be able to take our time, discuss things, debate things - respectfully - and really listen to each other, I want to hear what you have to say about the issues I blog about. I want you to engage with each other in discussions about these issues.
This blog is, I hope, going to be as dynamic and adaptive as we all are, it will be an active site, not on my part, but on yours. My posts are there to be engaged with, I want you to have discussions, with me, with each other, about the things I talk about. This is for me the most important aspect of this blog.
So, enjoy, engage and express.
.This will be my first ever blog post, on my first ever blog.
I have never written a blog before. I have written a lot online and on paper. I have been writing poetry for over 2 decades, writing is something I enjoy. I have, however, been in a bit of a creative and writing funk for the last few years, uni definitely made an impact in that, you don't have the same time or energy to expend on creative projects when you are balancing your own physical and mental health with being at university.
I have been thinking about writing a blog for a while now, I have also started a few other projects, including my own autobiography, and I have got back into writing poetry again.
I spend a lot of time online, whether on various social media platforms or for the business and I enjoy interacting with other people, but as someone who has both an anxiety disorder and agoraphobia, I find that social interaction for me consists mostly of online interaction. So my writing has adapted, as I have, and I tend to write what could be entire blog posts in other forums which don't quite have the format for them.
This blog is not anything special, I don't have a professional editor, or special software or anything else; we don't have the resources for anything like that, it's just me. So if this all looks very basic, it's because it is. I am using the tools at my disposal, and those are limited tools and limited resources.
A lot of the issues I like to discuss are complicated and sometimes sensitive, I find these to be the most interesting and often the most in need of being discussed in more depth. My interests are varied, but I have a keen interest in mental health, inequality, psychology and sociology and most of the issues I like to discuss are centered around these in some way.
I intend this to be not only a place for me to air my thoughts, but also for you to air yours. You can disagree or agree as you want, I encourage the discussion, this is exactly why I created the blog. This is a space for you to read, converse, listen and be heard.
I think we have a lot of social interaction and forums dedicated to this, I'm sure we all use them, but how often can we say we were able to have a really well thought out discussion, or really think about something? or, and possibly the most important aspect, how often can we say we felt we had really been heard?
Everything online is designed to be as fast as possible, this is not what I want for this blog. I want us to be able to take our time, discuss things, debate things - respectfully - and really listen to each other, I want to hear what you have to say about the issues I blog about. I want you to engage with each other in discussions about these issues.
This blog is, I hope, going to be as dynamic and adaptive as we all are, it will be an active site, not on my part, but on yours. My posts are there to be engaged with, I want you to have discussions, with me, with each other, about the things I talk about. This is for me the most important aspect of this blog.
So, enjoy, engage and express.
Hello. I discovered the present blog due to your post on cognitive bias, moral panic, etc. being shared to Twitter by one David Allsopp. I decided to comment on this post in particular because few things warm my heart more than people taking up blogging at this late date, so many years after the golden age of blogging. I really miss those days, as I hate social media (except on those rare days such as today when social media manages to point me to a still-active blog) and hate even more the blogosphere killers that are the monetization-lite platforms for writing, such as Medium or Substack. Certainly I approve of courtesy to living authors, and would never fault one for monetizing content, but I do think it's extra special when one goes with the old school tools and just puts stuff out there to be discovered. I do believe monetization inevitably leads to a "calculated" approach to creation.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's super cool that you're an archaeologist. Every so often, I ask myself why I still blog, since there's very little audience looking for blogs, very few effective ways to monetize blogs, etc., and the answer I keep coming back to is that I believe (I simply have to believe) that someday there will be "archaeologists of the web." How far in the future this will be, I do not know, but I imagine they will have more advanced technology than we do for searching through vast amounts of content. Likewise, I can only imagine (and of course hope) that such archaeologists will be more interested in "indie" content than canned content, more interested in noncommercial than commercial, perhaps more interested in amateur than professional. So I guess with this comment my secret is out. Future web archaeologists (assuming there will be such a thing) are my primary intended audience, followed I suppose by whatever IndieWebCamp or ReadWriteWeb types might manage to grace my page by somehow finding it.