Menoreturnagain; The Boomarang Posts; 3

A sporadic series of re-posts from the first year of this blog. The writing was in a process of 'finding voice', so was not necessarily smooth. Or even made sense. However, it IS a record of my life at that time. I therefore reprint verbatim. No sanitising!

This one is from April 21st 2013:

⚝⚝⚝

What accounts for the popularity of blogging?  That's easy.  Mankind is a social animal.  From the beginning of time he has determined that the best method of survival comes in gathering together; first that meant in hunting.   Mammoths are big.  One spear won't cut wool.  Then came gathering and cropping.  Labour intensive, made lighter by many hands.  Next came argy-bargy for territory.  Armies only happen if you've got numbers of bodies to put in them.

So it went on until the heady days of wide-spread communication via the town criers and wandering minstrels.  Folk always wanted to know everyone else's business.  It has always been used to measure oneself by.  It has also always been subject to interpretation and invention.

When the common man learned to read and write, along came true mass communication.  Once begun, there was no stopping that monster.  When the technological age came along and semaphore was developed - well!  Next came ticker-tape, established postal systems and - goodness gracious - the telephone.  EEEK.  Once that came out of the realms of 'only for the rich and famous', Joe Blogg and his aunty could set the neighbourhood on fire with a few salacious words and an eaves-dropping telephonist.  ...yes you read that correctly.  We used to call the nameless representative of societal man "Joe Blogg".  The writing was on the wall.

What one wrote and how one wrote it became a matter of discussion in itself.  Active participation became ever-more available.  Global communications with absolute strangers began with the postcard exchanges and "pen-friends".  I had one friend in Sri Lanka with whom I maintained a connection for about 8 years (a record for that type of thing) - she went to Uni and that quenched it.

That, Dear Reader, was the start of blogging, right there.  Cards and envelopes winging across the world, bringing with them exotic smells, tales of lives lived differently and building the Global Village.

It was this aspect which persuaded me, finally, there is a place for blogging in the social structures of our day.  Nothing beats Actual Facing.  But for the adventurous in spirit and the restless of finger, this is surely the way to go.  Yours Truly dipped her ethereal toe into the cloud with a picture blog, thinking 'that will do for now'.  Oh, the innocence of the early user!

Once tasted, ever the slave.

I'm sure it can be weaned off.  Like beating the mangoholism and the bhangra-fixes.

But one has to want to 'get straight'.  No.  As addictions go, at least this here can offer a podium from which to spread a little light and cheer... and it causes no physical harm.

Unless of course you count going blind.

                                                    ⚝⚝⚝