For seven-and-one-third years this blog has weighed on my brain like a digital nightmare. Apart from a six month break in 2007 and 18 months 2011-12, I've been writing or thinking about writing content. Even when I took a leave of absence words, phrases, screeds of 500 words or more often tangoed across my eyeballs when the shutters came down at night. As our minds have allowed social media technologies to colonise and structure our perceptions - how many times have you thought of a real-life happening in terms of an instagram snap or a sharply-observed tweet? - so mine finds half-digested ideas immediately suited to bloggable form. Okay, I confess. It is tempting to answer 'why I blog' with some pretentious twaddle about the technology using me instead of me using it. Or by way of physiological compulsion, "I think therefore I blog" or some such. Truth is, yes. I do feel the need. But I could quite easily stop and do something else. After all, there are more books than I'll ever read. Upstairs a stack of old MegaDrive and Super Nintendo titles are begging for hours to be sunk into them. I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, why don't you bugger off and do that instead". Sorry, no can do.
When I started this way back I thought the blog might act as some kind of scribble pad for my PhD. But polly-ticks. Sad to say, prod me with a finger and you'll find there's nothing but politics on the end of the tip. And it's been that way for a very long time - since I was ten. There was no way it would stay strictly academic.
In 2006 I'd not long joined the Socialist Party (née Militant) and like any good Trotskyist I wanted to talk my outfit up. The internet was another arena of class struggle, so it was less about vanity publishing and more battling with petit-bourgeois rascals, liquidationist renegades and those ever-dangerous sectarians on the fringes of the labour movement.
And then, come 2010 I was in the sell-out swamp as well. The Persil-spotless banner of the SP got traded in for Gordon Brown's Labour Party. And yet, surprisingly, the reach of this blog and my Twitter feed was not enough to stop the Tories from getting back in. I soldiered on and then made the proper leap into the mainstream/renegacy by taking the coin of a Member of Parliament. Shortly after came the break and since October 2012, the resumption of normal service. The fare, as before, takes in establishment and radical politics, social and cultural issues, media and social media, books, video games and music, philosophy and sociology, sectariana and sexuality. Somewhat immodestly - reticence is a bourgeois affectation anyway - I've swaggered around the blogging block long enough to know you will find few politics bloggers who range across as many issues.
None of this answers "why". The truth is, justifications change like the weather. Vanity. Making the case for critical loyalty to Labour and the labour movement. Promoting the sociological imagination. Challenging misconceptions, misrecognition and stupidity wherever it is. Offering original takes you won't find elsewhere. All good reasons. But the real reason, ultimately, is I enjoy it.
So have a poke around with the subject cloud. At the very least you'll come away from this blog with a decent music taste.
Apart for the last sentence, the need for blogs like this is a bit like the motto of the BBC, which is to educate, inform and entertain. Although academic sociology can produce a recurrence of teeth grinding, there is usually a nub of something, even on the most academic blogs (the wolf's anus excepted) which is worth considering. If sociology has any point it is to help to produce a better world. Ideas on their own can't do this but are a necessary condition. A very high ratio of interesting material to ...less so. (I don't share the interest in computer games but that is simply age related). So, no need to introspect about your motives. Just keep on throwing the hot coals of your introspection to the outside world.
ReplyDeleteThanks. It had taught me a lot, even when i don't entirely understand or agree.
ReplyDeletesince you've posted this, i've gone back and have been re-reading some of your previous entries, and i have this to say: this a great blog. not only do you have a thorough grasp on the theory, in your writing, you do an excellent job of formulating and explaining the concepts you want your readers to employ when they start to think about themselves in relation to the word we inhabit. in fact, i think this blog is an excellent example of a term you yourself have often used--the sociological imagination. and, in addition to being able to cast an analytical eye to what's going on around you, i think you're also sufficiently self-critical as well, so that reading your blog never becomes stale. even, the stuff you write about computer games, which i myself don't play (ken hit the nail on the head--it's a generational thing).
ReplyDeleteles
p.s. one question though. do you take requests? i mean, DJs do it...
And you do it all so well, without mentioning that bloody fraud Zizek.
ReplyDeleteFeel free to put a request in Les ...
ReplyDeleteOoops.
ReplyDeletewhatever you reason, I'm glad that you do.
ReplyDeletethanks