Micerino the cat. ©1988 Francesco Grasso
The original concept for this site, including the theme and most of the ideas, dates back to 1998, a long time before people even started blabbing about blogs.
Then, you know… my laziness, the immature times… I delayed the project until now, when I am starting from scratch. I’m still a little concerned about calling Blumudus a “blog”, since it was conceived as a “personal site” with a slightly different internal logic.
My motive is that of giving visibility to out-of-the-schemes ideas, therefore in this site you’ll find reasoned assertions you’d hardly find anywhere else; I’m not interested in rehashing news or in coming up with something to post just to meet a daily schedule, and I don’t like the short-lived articles approach.
I wonder if the reason of the limited penetration of the blog phenomenon in Germany may stem from the same reason: being a nation of thinkers par excellence (it is not by chance that the most prominent ideologies are born German, as are those monumental essays, spanning hundreds or thousands of pages, dense of footnotes, about philosophy, exegesis, history…), maybe they too feel it is inadequate to compress, and trivialize in a few sentences, complex concepts deserving more than the attention span corresponding to the interval between two commercials.
(The world evolves very rapidly, I hope this blog is still alive and kicking way past the age when a teenager won’t understand the concept of interval between commercials, because TV as we know it won’t be anymore…)
Ok, now… if I managed to make you lose the thread, this proves your attention span is nothing to brag about. :D
Blogs’ fortune is for a good part based on the democratic presumption that everyone deserves to express an opinion on anything, even if they have no expertise on the subject. This too is a significant risk.
But the most controversial aspect, to me, are the comments: they surely enrich the blog, nonetheless I hesitated a lot before deciding to let them in. I’m not sure I’ll keep them either, or that I won’t enforce restrictions: I willing to experiment (ok, first of all I need some readers, who knows how many “0 comments” posts lie in my future…).
As I see it, if we exclude the most popular websites, where the comments have been abolished, or on the contrary there are so many of them that it is impossible to read them all, so in practice it’s nearly as if they weren’t there, and if we exclude the blogs at the opposite site of the spectrum, where there are nearly no comments, in many cases the discussion seems to be hijacked by some regulars, shifting the topic and destroying focus, or just trolling.
My intention is to answer directly to reasonable comments/observations, if the topic requires it I may instead point to a future dedicated post, but I retain the right to slash and destroy the off topic comments.
If I look around I see things like: a post about God, with the conversation obliterated by an endless comment by some habitual troll about his beloved Buddhism, even if the topic was completely different, with tedious citations and 28 errors in 30 lines, errors that would need to be patiently countered one by one, with an incredible waste of time, since no one would read them anyway, including the troll himself! Cut!
We need a lot of advancements in order to improve this young medium. Nowadays superficial hype prevails. On the other hand, the blog world is positively transforming information, you don’t need my words to get this.
Even here in Italy, where usually innovations gain traction more slowly (blogs included), the culture of free internet discussion is already anticipating the development of the rest of society. For instance a breakup is underway in the Italian “right wing” between Catholics and anticlerical types; it first manifested itself through frictions between bloggers, and then only a few months later, between major politicians. Another example is the catholic victory, back in 2005, in a referendum about artificial insemination, when the committed effort of websites like samidzatonline was in touch with the real society, while the traditional media, all united siding with the obligatory materialistic ideology, as it has always been in the last 150 years, were on a mission to teach the Italians how they should think the opposite of what they think.
Up until now, information coming from high above, used to indoctrinate according to the wishes of the élite, was very effective in modifying the common beliefs, often causing 180 degrees turns. Now, thanks to the online conversation, things are changing. We’ll get back to this in future posts.
In conclusion, of course this new means of communication gives us great opportunities: it develops horizontally, it is free, easily accessible, partecipated by readers, warholian, so to speak. But the other side of the coin is an atomized culture. And it is now easy to appear authoritative just by presenting wrong ideas in the right way.
That’s why today it’s even more crucial than ever to develop a critical attitude. Modestly, if there is a quality I don’t lack, that is the ability to criticize, so place your trust with me, and I’ll guide you to separate the wheat from the chaff… :-)
I chose not to create 2 or more separate blogs to write about different topics: right next to a section dealing with God and religion, you’ll find the Science & Technology one. This may be disorienting, but I believe we can obtain interesting interrelations between topics.
Another category I like a lot is titled Humans, and it deals with the reality of how human beings really are in their essence; it has interesting moral and sociological consequences. I present this human nature from my own, catholic, point of view, but this analysis speaks directly to the rational man and is based on facts, so it doesn’t require a confessional membership to be appreciated.
The World & Media section deals with the planet we live in, the latest news (though I won’t post stuff if I don’t have something original to say), the shamelessness of the media… with some inevitable overlapping with the other sections. Dealing with topics that are generally of universal interest, sometimes more specific of my country.
Here I’ll grab the opportunity to explain the bilingual nature of Blumudus. I am willing to duplicate all the content in Italian and in English. As an Italian whose sight is pointed more towards the planet, this is a natural choice.
I think this glocalization is a nice opportunity for all the readers, to rethink the limits of our partial views, comparing and contrasting perspectives.
Lastly, the Little Things category is reserved for any other topic: I will rant about more or less trivial things.
This blog is meant to be different, swimming against the tide, sharp, direct and maybe brutal, but always marked by a profound respect for all the people. (Let’s hope that Blumudus’ cuddly nature will remember me that I should try to be good. Anyway, please contact me if I am too verbose, not clear, or if there are language mistakes.)
Here you’ll find a sort of oasis, far away from the politically correctness mania…
Here no one is going to waste time and energies to vigorously take a stand in emphatically emphasizing how much they condemn some crime (of the few that still are seen as crimes).
This said, I’ll humbly entrust this online effort to the Virgin Mary. (Note: I’m not humble)
Better, to the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph. Or better still, to the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint Thomas the Aquinas and Saint Francis of Sales.
As I am already here, I’ll add Saint Maximilian Kolbe to the pack, it doesn’t hurt. (Aww, those dreaded papists…)
