New Media, New Meaning

I've been delving into new media as a way to save my dying industry – or really just my own skin. I met with a multi-media entrepreneur recently about this, a dodgy American former sports journalist. He said to me, "There are two kinds of people in the world: hunters and farmers, and I'm a hunter." I just thought that meant he is sleazy. His company seems to be staffed by beautiful women.

Still he gave me some good ideas about how the internet is the one place where you can effectively combine text, audio, and video together. It is truly multimedia. I always feel like time flies faster than an arrow, whilst I stay behind watching the sun set across the sky. I would be happier in the age of Tolstoy, where all you had was pen and paper and a steam train to transmit your ideas to the world.

But now those degrees of separation between people have gone. We're all whores in a way, inappropriately close to one another. And so this leads me to blogging in the mainstream press. I read the blogs of foreign correspondents of the big English papers, and they're really just articles – a bit shorter and at blog intervals. They're impersonal, they're political/socio-economic. But that's not what people read blogs for.

Blogs fascinate because it's the voice of an individual, not filtered through the voice of a paper, not filtered through their litigation department, nor edited and cleansed. It's about their personal journey, whether life makes them or breaks them. Anyone who wants to blog has to give up a part of themselves to cyberspace. Even when it's professional it needs to be personal. It has to extract that price. I wonder if journalists are really willing to do that, and if that's why none of their blogs are as captivating as Brazen Careerist where she shares – in between career advice - her divorce, remarriage and miscarriages.

One day I'll do that … maybe.