An email received today gave me the opportunity to take a little walk down memory lane, to the history of “the Pen”.
Rooster and I, back in the day (the day being from 2003-2005) were extremely avid bloggers (surprise!). Upon reflection, I don’t think we were really all that flash - particularly with our political analysis (my political analysis).
Back when we were university students, blogging seemed like the easiest way to navigate through the political quagmire that was the late Howard years. We were the product of the so called “me generation” which apparently meant that our cohort (those born from 1980 onwards) was engendered with a strong sense of individualism, materialism and political apathy. However, we never really felt that we subscribed to that label, or that it really represented us.
I was always left leaning as a teenager, but came from an extremely conservative high school which did not engage that openly in debate. Plus I only got the internet in 2002, which meant I wasn’t really getting exposed to the concepts that I so wanted to engage in.
Though University opened us to a myriad of opportunity and exposed us to different dialogs with masses of people, I found that either I engaged with people who:
a) Weren’t particularly interested in politics
b) Were extremely interested in politics, but perhaps did not have the patience to engage with someone who was just new to many of the concepts that I was first exposed to during in my first year at uni.
Without a happy medium, blogging opened up a whole new world for me, sad as that may be. And it allowed me to engage in debates and discussion (for example refugees in detention, feminism and gender politics, the neoconservative uprising in Australia - and its subsequent demise of sorts) that I could not (or did not feel confident in discussing) in my day to day life. And being a poor uni student, blogging gave me the opportunity to muse frequently, at low cost.
In 2005, however, University wrapped up and suddenly I found myself with a full time job and not much time for writing. And whilst it was sad to give it up, it was probably a good thing upon reflection. The dialog switched from online, to more open/public surroundings. Really, that was the way it should be. I’m disappointed that I was too shy at uni to engage in debates and instead scuttled home to furiously type out my angst and publish it in the blogosphere. On the upside, I’m glad that I was able to have learned so much about political and social analysis through our online community.
We’re back to writing now, more for fun than anything else. And we’re not much “pseudo political pundits” these days either. I leave the real analysis to the big kids and just stick to naff and pop culture etc.
Addendum: As I was writing the email, I ended up chasing up the blogs we used to follow back in the day. Turns out, a whole heap of them stopped writing when the war was over. Which is a shame really.
