Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The Premier Post
Welcome to Quick Wry Post, where I, Sean Masaki Flynn, will be blogging from now on.
Blogs mean that solioquies become dialogues. Rather than just one person saying what they think a la Martin Luther and his famous theses, we now have a new technology that lets readers talk back and which places their comments on an equal footing with the original posting. That is, both are public, open, and fully revealed. You can't be misquoted and you can't be taken out of context. It's all there in black and white. And it's all there forever so that if someone hears a rumor of something you've posted, they can verify it or refute it for themselves.
I hope that as this blog grows and matures, it will inspire lots of dialogue. Plato is much more fun to read than Aristotle because he couched nearly everything as conversations between Socrates and various drinking companions whereas all we have left from posterity of Aristotle are notes that various students took of Aristotle's lectures. Plato was a blogger, with lots of give and take. Aristotle's compilers were journalists, reporting only what had been originally said and nothing of what came next.
Now, as for the name of this blog, I came by the pun (cf. Quick Riposte) independently. But when I did a Google search, I discovered to my chagrin that the pun had been made at least once before by a poster named Jim Lucas, while making a comment on a message board at www.concertina.com. You can find his (very excellent) put near the bottom of this page here.
Blogs mean that solioquies become dialogues. Rather than just one person saying what they think a la Martin Luther and his famous theses, we now have a new technology that lets readers talk back and which places their comments on an equal footing with the original posting. That is, both are public, open, and fully revealed. You can't be misquoted and you can't be taken out of context. It's all there in black and white. And it's all there forever so that if someone hears a rumor of something you've posted, they can verify it or refute it for themselves.
I hope that as this blog grows and matures, it will inspire lots of dialogue. Plato is much more fun to read than Aristotle because he couched nearly everything as conversations between Socrates and various drinking companions whereas all we have left from posterity of Aristotle are notes that various students took of Aristotle's lectures. Plato was a blogger, with lots of give and take. Aristotle's compilers were journalists, reporting only what had been originally said and nothing of what came next.
Now, as for the name of this blog, I came by the pun (cf. Quick Riposte) independently. But when I did a Google search, I discovered to my chagrin that the pun had been made at least once before by a poster named Jim Lucas, while making a comment on a message board at www.concertina.com. You can find his (very excellent) put near the bottom of this page here.
