Should You Need a License to Blog?

Maybe not a license, but certainly maturity, emotional intelligence and a willingness to want to learn new stuff would well-equip a blogger who is so bold as to go where few have gone before.

Here’s how I see blogging/commenting/being a part of any online community. Blogging (and online community, in general) is in its infancy and we few who feel as if we’re the center of the Online Universe have it way wrong. Very few are reading us and we get caught up in thinking that everyone’s eyes are on us. It’s kind of like pre- and pubescent kids who think everybody’s looking at them when the fact of the matter is nobody’s looking at them – who in their right minds want to look at pre and pubescent kids? Very few (except for the pedophile freaks out there and a few others interested in the subject!) And the same goes for us – nobody’s really looking except for we nutty few who are engaged with each other, like to spend time in each others company – for a variety of reasons. Kind of like a typical family.

“All happy families are alike; they have dinner together and the children do the dishes; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; it could be anything: drunkenness, sassy back-talk, refusal to clean up one’s room, tantrums, nose-picking, adultery, don’t ask.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, original manuscript, pre-edited form

That’s what we have here in the “family” that inhabits each and every one of our universes - drunkenness, sassy back-talk, refusal to clean up one’s room, tantrums, nose-picking, adultery, and much, much more! That’s what families are – imperfect organisms where we learn how to behave out in the bigger world. And this is the reason for this post.

Blogging and participating online is like going to school except for the fact that your “school records” are engraved on the ether. Okay, you have to accept that and if you venture out onto what I originally imagined as a vast black spider-web stretching into infinity when I heard someone say they were “out on the Web” way back in 1996 you have to realize that this goes with the territory.

That being said, online we can learn how to do just about anything and that includes learning very basic communication skills like how to get along with people. Now I understand that there are probably a lot of people online who prefer their own company over the company of others and that makes them particularly grumpish but that will gradually change in the future. Now and in the future it is important that we all learn how to play with each other in the gritty sandbox.

The first thing we must learn online is how to get along with each other – how to become a person others wish to spend time with. That does not include some of the things that Tolstoy originally identified above – particularly sassy back-talk, refusal to clean up one’s room, tantrums and, worst of all, nose-picking in public (yes, those pictures will get out) and let me add one more, garrulousness.

You’re not making any friends or influencing anyone when you choose to engage in “prosy, rambling, or tedious loquacity that is pointlessly or annoyingly talkative” nor when you decide to lambaste others as being wrong on stances they’ve taken. Thrashing and bashing, beating and berating and sharply scolding isn’t going to win you any brownie points with anyone and you're just going to end up hating yourself more.

Now, all that being said, here’s some more of what we can learn that will serve all of us in our blogging careers/be forewarned - in order to learn some of this stuff we have to be able to accept those term papers back, our errors marked up in red and graded - remember those?
How to spell
How to sentence-construct
How to capture ideas and get them across in written formats
How to influence
How to change the world

Pretty heady stuff, isn’t it? I think so.

He was a religious writer and interested in the Master's views. "How does one discover God?"
Said the Master sharply, "Through making the heart white with silent meditation, not making paper black with religious composition." And, turning to his scholarly disciples, he teasingly added, "Or making the air thick with learned conversation." ~ Anthony de Mello, SJ