C L O S E R – What's the use? Enough is Enough: Going Liminoid
It is not that strange if people go to a priest for some advice or to a counselor or to a friend or family member. But what if you have a very important questions that are actually existential challenges to you being a virtual person and you ask Google for answer? Existence evaporated into thin virtual space, if you ask me, or hit by a Dutch windmill that’s probably the right answer.
So why blog? In Dutch have posted a few entries stating that bloggers are hyperindividualistic narcistic individualists and that probably includes me. Yes and I am happy that I have a few hard core visitors and that my posts seem to be picked up by the media sometimes and that seem visitors engage in debates that are worthwile. The blog also allows me to experiment with some new ideas, new ways of writing things up and in some cases my blog seems to give some kind of authority on radicalism on the internet (don’t know if I want that; my research is not about radicalism). On the other hand some people who object to scholars who blog also have a case in point. You don’t know what the value of every blog is, some bloggers go with every flow and create their own hypes, only young girls read blogs (apologies to my hard core readers: I did not say that) and how much of the material on your blog and the debates that only seldom follow, do you really include in your book? (To be honest, in my PhD thesis I will mention this blog only twice and then only with a general statement in a footnote…). How much time do you spend blogging and how far would your PhD thesis have been if you didn’t blog? (I’m not going to tell you that, that is embarassing).
Of course I’m not the first blogger (another argument for stop bloggin?) who asks the question of Why Blog? And some people who have asked this question have found an answer: Honey it’s grate. Hell, there is a whole science about the use (pdf) of blogging. Some thoughts about this are worth displaying here:
As I snarked into the great abyss with no expectation of interaction or response, my philosophy was that everybody online was just snarking into a great abyss, and perhaps foolishly hoping for interaction and response.
I think there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this: intellectual maturity is a thankless state of being. The time and trouble required to observe the world and analyze it in depth, to structure those observations and analyses into cogent arguments, to begin engaging in whatever shreds of civilized discourse remain in this crazy world of ours, is so staggering that it can easily grind a person into dust.
So, I am going into a liminoid state as the great Victor Turner would have said it. I am voluntarily devoting myself to the quest and consider this a journey to the unknown as a ludic journey in order to free myself from my ordinary social roles and expectations and foster an alternative type bonding based upon a shared experience of humanity. What this means? I will tell you later, perhaps, perhaps not. And maybe, just maybe I come up with the answer, or maybe just maybe others already have found the answer to this nagging question: What’s the use of blogging?
Hi,
Sorry for leaving this comment here but your email address does not come up on the email me page.
Anyway I just wanted to suggest a link for your site.
http://www.haqislam.org
Many thanks in advance.
ehm, but what are you going to do exactly? iow, what is liminoid to blogging?
“liminal personae” are neither living nor dead, and both living and dead; they express the ambiguity of the interstructural period. This ambiguity is also demonstrated by the fact that the ritual subjects are during the seclusion period disguised or hidden; they are considered neither male nor female, deprived of rank, status and property. They are all treated equally and are subjected to the rest of the community. In sum, the liminal subjects are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner 1969a:95).
I love it! When you finally emerg from your chrysallis you can teach the rest of the blogosphere how to be more than we already are…
(don’t victor turner me, please 😉
i still don’t see how liminoid stands to blogging. or will you be making only private entries that only you can read?
no, he’s on holiday.