A lumber yard northeast of Encarnación, Paraguay.
Okay, so according to a BBC article Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is actually only the world’s second richest man. And, um, actually he didn’t actually buy a dead tree. But he might as well have.
What Mr. Slim has done is to invest 250 million dollars into the New York Times—rounding out his stake in the financially struggling United States newspaper. What?! Is this guy a total fucking idiot?
I wonder this because from what I’m hearing, newspapers are totally, utterly on the way out, thanks in large part to people like you who are spending your time reading blogs for non-objective reporting instead of “dead tree” newspapers, which according to an article I recently read, nobody believes anymore anyway.
I know, I know. Slim’s beyond rich and he didn’t get that way making foolish investments. So he probably knows shitloads more about media and new media and phrases like the “developing paradigm of media” than I do. And so maybe he’s simply taking the New York Times so he can push it in the right direction.
But then, it’s hard to see how there can be a right direction when media is quickly, quickly being taken over by us regular old people.
I wonder if Slim has tried blogging? Has he felt the power of instant, polished, global-wide publishing with the social media interactivity that was only a science fiction concept a few years ago? If he has, I wonder how it plays into his investment decision? But I won’t go further with that thought, or ask you — Web 2.0, social media-style — to try to answer any of these questions.
The only reason I’m writing this little tidbit is to test blogging out myself — to continue moving forward with my own, first baby steps in the Blogoshpere.
In some kind of Web -2.0, what-the-fuck irony, I now find myself being the poster child for the so-called “old media paradigm” that I am bashing. The simple truth of the matter is that I can now be considered a “blogging expert” when I have little more than five minutes of actually personal blogging experience. That’s write, I’ve written three or four articles on blogging, including one for the United’s prestigious Hemisphere’s magazine, but for I have written no more than twenty postings for this, my personal blog — the only one that really matters to me — and all of these have really been just for practice, to figure out how to use WordPress.
I’ve certainly grasped the concept of blogging. But with very few exceptions — say, nuclear warfare — concepts are a hell of a lot less interesting than the real thing. And so, appropriately, in my articles I have advised people to get started now!, not over think it!, and develop their blogging voice over time. The Blogosphere is forgiving, I have written. HAVE FUN!, have said. You can’t really appreciate the full power of blogging until you do it.
And yet I have not done my own blogging, becoming more and more entrenched as a hypocritical writer stuck in the old paradigm of publishing, striving for some kind of insane perfection in static articles that go out to just a few thousand people. It’s kind of a shitty position to be in, I have to admit. How does one become such a dumbass idiot?
Fear, of course. I know it’s not apathy because I wouldn’t be working my ass off on such high quality, old-paradigm articles if I were apathetic. And I also wouldn’t feel so trapped, unable to start blogging in earnest because I am embarrassed by the fact that I am the only blogging expert in the world who has never blogged.
Ironically, this dumbass so full of fear is even worse than you might imagine. Why? Because I recently published an article on the importance of overcoming fear to succeed as a photographer, which of course applies to any creative professional.
Jesus Christ!, you might think. A blogging expert who writes about overcoming fear who is too fearful to blog! It’s too much!
I agree. It is too much. But if you are reading these words it means that I have crossed over the line, having become a true blogger and somehow overcome at least a few of my fears. And the truth is, I have.
Before writing this post – overwrought with tension about what you (a fictional reader I don’t know or my Aunt Dilda who doesn’t give a shit) — I was somehow trying to make something happen that couldn’t happen, blogging on paper (I shit you not) and constantly revamping my theme concept on paper (again, I shit you not), even though I had written articles encouraging people to do exactly the opposite.
Anyway, no one will ever even read these words, and if you are it doesn’t really matter. I don’t need to come up with some witty or perceptive conclusion to bring it all home, as I struggle to do in my articles. The only point of this post is to help me get over my fear and the only way to do that is to feel the fear, which is the same as getting past the fear, which I am doing, at the same time I am actually blogging.
So good for me. Who cares if this is will come across to “you” as utterly egocentric and boring – probably my worst fear, if you want to know the truth. This is not about you. It’s about me. And I guess that’s what Jason was on about when he told me in December that he wished that I would be a little bit more self-serving in my various crafts.
I think this is all finally starting to come together, which makes me want to think that it will become easier, more comfortable. And saying that wants me to say, “But feeling fear is good.” And it might be. But feeling so much fear that I am incapacitated to the point of being a blogging expert who does not blog is, honestly, a situation a lot worse than death. And as I’m still alive I’ve got to continue moving forward. So I think for me the trick is to learn to focus on the fact that what I most afraid of is mediocrity, and that I have been so deeply afraid of it for so long that I have actually become my worst nightmare: a very, very mediocre word-writing, picture-taking man who detests what he is and does not know how to escape this viscous trap.
I will now try an experiment.
I will do my damndest to post this only spellchecking, not changing a goddamn fucking thing for the first fucking time in my life.