ON MOBS AND BLOGS

I’m not sure what really got me started blogging, but I have some ideas as to what planted the seed in my fertile brain.

I signed up for this Blogger account two years ago when I first started hearing about the concept of weblogs, but promptly forgot all about it. So Blog D’Elisson sat dormant for the first two years of its existence with nary a single post.

And then, someone - a blogger - made a rude comment about Elder Daughter.

It seems that, back in August 2003, Elder Daughter was quoted in an AP wire service article on flash mobs. You remember flash mobs, that (I guess) short-lived phenomenon in which a whole mess of people would suddenly materialize out of nowhere for no apparent reason, do some sort of meaningless stunt, and then evaporate.

Larry Niven, the popular science fiction writer, saw this coming a long time ago. In his 1971 novella “Flash Crowd,” Niven envisioned a future in which thousands of people would show up at the same place at once in order to witness a social or political event. In his story, the enabling technology was cheap, easily available teleportation, but today’s flash mobs are supposedly made possible by modern communication technologies: IM’s, text messaging, et alia.

The phenomenon has been around longer than you think. Some of us are old enough to remember the original flash mobs. Jean Shepherd, the late radio raconteur and humorist (perhaps best known for writing the short stories that were cobbled together to create the popular movie “A Christmas Story”) used to have a late night radio show in New York. Occasionally, he would tell his listeners (whom he called the “Night People”) to assemble at various random locations and times...just for the hell of it. And they would. So the “flash mob” phenomenon is at least 35 years old.

But back to our story. One Sunday morning, while having my usual breakfast at Ye Olde Neighborhood Bagel Emporium, someone asked me whether I had seen Elder Daughter’s name in the paper. No, I had not, but sure enough, buried in the business section was the AP wire service article. And, being a wire service article, the story was picked up by papers across the known universe - including McPaper.

My “’satiable curtiosity” got the better of me one day and I did an egogoogle - a Google search on my own name. Imagine my surprise when I saw that AP article on flash mobs popping up. And not just in newspaper websites.

On blogs.

And now I realized what a blog really was. Not just a diary, for many people it was a place to snip and clip news items of interest. And for some, a chance to comment.

One comment in particular got my attention. It was from a expat Westerner living in Korea, who had clipped and snipped the AP article and made numerous observations. He took a very dim view of the flash mob phenomenon, believing it to be disruptive, economically damaging, potentially dangerous, and basically a colossal waste of time engaged in by idiots. As I read further into his blog, I could see that he was a vitriolic, opinionated bastard.

And I enjoyed his writing. Despite his dissing Elder Daughter, his take on Asian politics and society, and on Korea in particular, was intelligent and well-expressed. It’s too bad he has since stopped blogging, because I was a regular reader.

That was my first real exposure to Bloggity World. Still not enough to start me on my own Road to Blogness, but it got me looking - and reading.

Mobs ’n’ Blogs. The seed was planted...