CAMPFIRE CHAT-LINES ARE LIKE SOME BLOGS

Those chats around campfires are a bit like some blogs and folk. They are both quite different from lectures given from up high in church or university or even school. A chat around the campfire is free - we can tune in and tune out at will. The campfire allows that kind of freedom. There is no master of ceremonies peering down at us. There is no one way to chat. The story continues around and around until it gets into a kind of memory or even a tradition. People pick up and mix and continue the story and it all goes on. It is all a bit like that old oral tradition in one way.
In Norway there has been a continuing debate concerning "book culture" and the older folk and oral culture attached to the lands-folk. Politics in Norway today has mainly taken the book-way-world but there are enough remaining just a little ( just well enough) outside to continue conversations with a campfire chat line.
But in Norway there is no one word for a campfire. Each local area has its own way of making and firing fires. Indeed a knowledgeable Norwegian walking hills or forest can often tell just who made that fire and this through the structure and design.
Many blogs are, it seems to me, like this. OK.

WHO NICE TO CONTROL THE SUBJECT(s)

Yet another blogsite pretends towards freedom of comment and anti-censorship. But yet another blogsite controls the space. Oh how nice it would be if I knew THE subject let alone "my" subjects!! But alas I am, yet again, a dirty unserious space. I will never reach the status of a Queen this way.

DAMN THOSE DOGS?

I suspect that "Papa" Ernest Hemingway was correct concerning dogs. He said that we can always sniff and sense the human community as we experience the behaviour of the dogs that live there. I guess that this appreciation is also applicable to many other walks of life. Woff Wuff. Maybe I have been reading again the "Plague Dogs" book by Richard Adams. Maybe I cringe at UK politics. Maybe I respond, in my own way, to the issue of awkward blogging. But please do not shoot the Hermes adventurer.

DUMBING DOWN E-WAYS

Every now and then blogs and comments pages on the net go though periods of heated discussion whereby all manner of chat and reporting is set free. It seems that the last few weeks have been just such a time. The hot spot right now is the Frank Fisher site ( see my links ) where the chat is moving between damned good comment and damned good anger set free. These sites are communication sites within communities that differ in their individual make-up as one would expect from a vital human community. As the good Hermann Hesse would write back in the 1930s : oh how different we all are together and oh how much that is beautiful in humanity.

But many feel and have said in no uncertain terms ( a tell tale sign there in itself) that these blogs and sites are dumbed down. Decent standards are lost and content is lost to a playfulness. Of course one big debate here is that of the larger scene of Modernity and postmodernity but Zola would be better to allow this debate to open up below if folk so wish. The point is that this blog site is not an academic discourse. Indeed most academic discourses have been a miserable failure for most folk. Perhaps blogs and comments pages can reach those places that over-academic "papers" fail to reach.

Yet a few questions remain. Just what are these "appropriate standards" anyway. Who decides and who the guardian of the gates and why?
How do most folk really learn?
Well if Zola carries on this way for too long there will be zero comments and the world will drift into a new dumbness called boredom and doze. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Perhaps a reasonable comment from Zola is this : Principles are best made as the happenings actually happen with and through folk. principles are terrible when passed down from above as if on tablets of stone. Perhaps these blog sites are busy right now in finding out in togetherness those principles that make good sense.