Oh, Meg’s post today made me smile. My favourite, because it annoys me every morning, “It’s the people who try to get on the train before others have a chance to get off”.
This morning the post man knocked more than once. PY, who always jumps out of bed for parcels and post, decided to answer the door where he discovered a large parcel from Out – my lovely black fleece had arrived (from OutOnTheStreets to be precise). This event, and Tom’s post (which I highlighted the other day and started out as a response to this) set me thinking about notions of community.
Now Out is an online community of (mainly) gay men from around the world – although at the moment it’s predominantly UK based. It’s a great place to be and very unlike many of the other commercial gay sites. It’s all about social interactions and not about sex (like some) nor about profit (like others). It funds itself by way of a non-compulsory licence fee and sells merchandise to add to that. It encourages real-world events and traditional social interaction.
Now, I have never attended one of the events and I don’t log on every day (like some). I don’t count many of my friends (online or otherwise) as being members and I can’t say I have made any lasting friendships on Out – although many have.
However, it is still a community and I am still part of it. I choose to contribute financially and I should do more in real life. There are many issues raised by Out that I shall discuss in more detail at some point soon (paying for online content; the concept of zero exploitation and the concept of online communities) but at this point all I want to say is that I feel similar about blogging. I do it primarily for my own record/entertainment/amusement. As a by-product, I get to tell the world how I feel about things and strike up some interesting discussions and relationships along the way. It’s a place for me to express and, most importantly, it’s another community that I belong to. Again, I’m not the most active member of this community but I certainly feel it is a community and one I am happy to be part of.
2004: links for 2004-10-26
2003: Phones and PDAs
I am about to embark on a Friday night out in Clapham. More specifically, a colleague (we’ve worked together now and have previously worked together) and I are off to meet two ex-work mates (from the last job we worked at) for Friday night drinks. I believe I am turning into some kind of hermit because I want to stay in the whole time so, although I know I will have a great time (and possibly one to many drinks), I would rather be catching the 19:07 home. A bid sad, isn’t it?
2003: The Quiet American
plasticbag.org has a great new item about the community of UK webloggers – plasticbag.org | files | Who’s afraid of community participation?
I do consider myself a member of a community of UK webloggers. And I feel that way because we all have something in common – a shared experience maybe, or a desire to learn from one another, an interest in other people who validate our ‘hobbies’ or maybe it’s just because what matters to one of us is more likely to matter to other ones of us. I don’t share my politics or my sexuality with many of these people. Nor my gender, many of my interests, my ethnicity or my obsession with Buffy.
I’m too tired – as it’s too early/late – to comment so go read it!
2004: Billy Connolly
2003: CD or not to CD?
My trusted Palm Vx – from which sprang the Listen To Musak blog (why just write stuff for my own reading when I can bore everybody else?) – contains many useful freeware/shareware and fully-paid up pieces of software that didn’t come pre-installed. The most useful is DateMate. DateMate is a simple little program that stores birthdays, anniversaries and events and is able to populate the Palm Date Book with update information so that I can always recall how old somebody is and how many years they have been married. If you own a Palm I would wholeheartedly recommend you look at it.
Sadly, however, I have done two silly things in the past months:
Ah well, maybe it would be easier to maintain a paper diary but it wouldn’t be as much fun, would it?
2003: Writer’s Block?
2003: Today On The Creek
Well, according to a report in this weekend’s Observer newspaper, the Ministry Of Defence is interested in the technology that allows us all to be monitored by our mobile phones. Apparently, there are many positive uses of this ‘spy’ technology – following people on the move (walking or driving) and monitoring areas (nuclear power stations, roads etc.) when visibility is bad. Nobody seems to ask what happened if you loan you mobile ‘phone to somebody or (gasp) switch it off. Observer: How mobile phones let spies see our every move
2005: links for 2005-10-15
2004: Less Clutter On The Air
Do you ever think that there is nothing to read online. I have to say, that today is one of those days. Perhaps tomorrow will be a better day! Still, Boys Will Do Boys is a great looking weblog!
No other posts on this day.
It may be October but the weather doesn’t suggest it at all. Anyway, my current three favourite blogs are saying this today:
Wonder how this will read in a year’s time?
A re-cycled plastic bag. Well, a new look anyway.
You may recall I said, on September 11, that my thoughts were with Bart who was going through the process of coming out as a gay man to his parents. He has been discussing this process in his blog for months and, finally, posted them a letter telling them he way gay. Their initial reaction seemed positive and supportive but now it seems to have turned negative and he is receiving email from his father quoting a range of anti-gay websites.
Now, I have an unbearable feeling of sadness. Here is a young man trying to do the right thing and here are a set of parents whose world seems to have fallen apart. While a blog is only small insight into somebody’s personality and the life that they lead, I do get the impression his parents are good people. So why do his recent entries make me feel so sad? I am certain they love their son and want the best for him. I am positive that they are trying to do (what they see as) the right thing. I am also fairly sure that they will accept their son and in years to come regret the way they handled the news (doing it all by email is, perhaps, not an ideal way to do this). Still, a certain part of me wants to believe people are good, supportive and that discrimination is something we will, eventually, only see in historical movies. I fear I am either naïve, or (as I would rather be) eternally hopeful.
There are coming-out experiences posted across the web. All are useful to a certain extent and all are useless by the fact that none of them deal with our own families and the dynamics of our relatives and their own belief systems. Many of them, good or bad, serve to show the world what a painful process this is for many gay men. Will it ever change? Tom posted an entry (see September 16th) which summarises some of this and, one day, I may post about the awful way I procrastinated the subject for too many years.
2004: Crazy Name, Worthy Cause
2002: Individual Portions
2002: Nike 10K