Pretentious bloggers

I haven’t written much here, lately, because I’ve been busy, and I haven’t had much to write. I’ve done pretty good on the serna Bible Blog, though. Not perfect—I haven’t written there every weekday—but pretty good.

I was reading an entry in someone else’s blog, today, and it was dripping with self importance. “We bloggers are documenting the 21^st century” kind of crap. (That’s not an actual quote, but it might as well be, for what she was writing.)

Looking back, and reading Anne Frank’s diary, we get a sense of history, and we learn what it was like for the Frank family, hiding from the Nazis. In a hundred years, if my blog were still online and someone were to read it, they would learn nothing about the 21^st century. All they would know is that sernaferna was an idiot, and had diarrhea of the keyboard. And same with most bloggers out there.

To be clear, I have absolutely nothing against the explosion of self expression that’s happening on the internet, especially over the last few years; through blogging, and podcasting, and putting up videos on services like YouTube, people are having more of a voice, and I think it’s great. There are some great blogs out there, written by non-professionals, and I hope that will continue. Even the not-so-great blogs serve a purpose; friends can keep up with each other by reading each other’s blogs.

But let’s not pretend that we’re some kind of internet pioneers, blazing a trail into uncharted territory. We’re just a bunch of people typing out random crap, most of which will be—and should be—forgotten by history. If we let our own self-importance grow too large, it will get in the way of us noticing the truly great blogs out there, or the truly great podcasters, or the people making truly great videos on YouTube.