The Theater of the Absurd

I have had issues with this idea of blogging for a while. Why blog? No one is going to read it, except maybe my friends and family--and they already know what I think. And where do I get off thinking that anyone out there cares about my thoughts or the minutia of my daily life? It's so pompous to blog, that it becomes ridiculously silly.

I found this article on the A-Team's Blog a while back. (I'm telling ya, they have great stuff!) It can be found in its entirety here, at Reformation 21.

In "The Theater of the Absurd," Carl Trueman suggests the danger of blogging is that blogmeisters begin to believe that, along with the right to speak, they have the right to be heard. And the internet makes it so easy to be heard! Trueman suggests we combat that nonsense out there by spending the majority of our blog-reading time on blogs that have substantial credentials. It makes far more sense to read the blog of a minister, perhaps, than the blog of some kid with a network computer in his bedroom.

Two sections in this article are worthy of quoting here:

It is that the whole blog phenomenon is inherently ridiculous; that the
more serious it tries to be, the more absurd and pompous it becomes; and that I
believe that if you can't beat the inevitable blogological deconstruction, you
might as well join it, and that with relish. As the old Buddhist proverb says,
'When faced with the inevitable, one must merely accept the inevitable.'

[...]

Or you could try another way, what we might call the 'Samuel Beckett' option: face this theatre of the absurd head-on; join in with the other nobodies pretending to be somebodies; laugh at your own ridiculous complicity in this nonsense; expose the systemic contradictions for all they are worth; mock the blogworld for all of its inane self-importance; and in so doing try in some small way to subvert the system from the inside. It may not ultimately work; but you'll have fun in the process.

So from this nobody pretending to be somebody, Happy New Year and Happy Blogging!