The Past Is Another Blog #1: In The Beginning

Dean Wareham - The Past Is Our Plaything

So here's a lazy idea for a new series, in which I dig back into the archives of my previous blog and mine it for content, thereby allowing myself to make sarcastic commentary on my younger self, with new tunes. Let's start by looking back at the first blog post I ever wrote...

Bob Seger - Looking Back

SUNDAY 3 DECEMBER 2006

I used to think blogging was pointless. I'm starting to think it'll soon be essential. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it may be unavoidable.

For my first post, I considered a huge essay on how the Internet might be a champion of the individual, leading us gloriously forwards to a true democracy of opinion... or it might be the beginning of a collective loss of identity and privacy, a hive mind that eventually erases the individual altogether.

But I'm not smart enough to write that essay, especially when far more incisive social commentators have been there already. In her book, 'Tomorrow's People', Professor Susan Greenfield suggests:

"In brief, the notion of an independent individual, with a private life and a unique portfolio of thoughts, knowledge and opinions, is finished."

The future scares me. "Maybe the Unabomber had a point." But we can't go back now.

So here I am. Welcome to my blog...

The Donnas - I Wanna Be a Unabomber

Ironically, I reckon I joined the blogoverse just as it had ceased to be essential, and the tastemakers were already starting to move on. I couldn't see that at the time. Maybe my arrival was the first nail in the coffin...

I don't know where I got that quote from, as I don't recall reading that book. Maybe I did. I read a lot more books 18 years ago. Of course, that quote seems all the more apt - and eerily prescient - looking back at it now. I'd like to claim some kind of foresight there, but as usual, I was just regurgitating what I'd read elsewhere, with added jokes. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

At which point, I could have linked to this... but I figured you might prefer...