Comments on: Munching on the wheat

By: Martin Kelley

Martin Kelley — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 09:28:02 +0000

*Hi Mitch:* Sorry it's not so fun anymore. I first found Leaves of Grass in its pre-blog state and loved following the stream of links and the paths it took me. The stories hung together in a way the blog posts never did. I'm interested to see how the new version looks! In my experience of online communities there's a definite honeymoon period when someone first joins--everything is possibilities and the new medium gives us a place to share the pent-up thoughts that have been sitting un-vocalized in our heads (after starting my blog I found QuakerRanter ready mini-essays from late 90s sitting on my hard-drive unsent and unpublished!). After a while things quiet down. Maybe the newcomer has said all they have to say. Maybe they're tired of having the same conversation for the fifth time. But here's the thing: the conversation is still new to those who haven't had it. Friends are still discovering blogs. We still need to have those conversations. I expect that some of the regulars will wander off (as they have since the beginning) and only check in from time to time. Some will take it as a ministry of sorts to stay involved and help set the tone and give the background. I should say too that I'm not looking for a cyber-city. The best part of all this blogging comes when people get off the computer and meet face-to-face. It's especially exciting when they're meeting someone they wouldn't have gotten to know without the blog networks. We're making connections here, deepening our understanding of Quakerism and getting comfortable with spiritual talk (at least three bloggers are being published for the first time in Quaker magazines this summer).

By: Mitchell Santine Gould

Mitchell Santine Gould — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:19:59 +0000

Hmmm… sorry, Martin, but I can’t join in your concern about anger in the blogosphere, when it seems to me that [startbeatinglamemetaphor] there’s a hole in the blogolayer itself. To continue to beat upon the lame metaphor, I sense the oxygen has hissed out. [/endbeatinglamemetaphor]
The Blogs, to put it more plainly, are neither as fun nor as collegial as they once were. I sense that people are losing interest. In regards to the general state of affairs, I’m in no position to elaborate further (because I would be guessing).
But I can say from personal experience, my own blog evolved from a simple platform to urge America to celebrate a good quakergray poet to an instant-publication medium for establishing my priority in making historical discoveries.
It stretched further to reflect my advocacy for Quaker testimonies in the ‘real’ (real wicked that is!) world.
(In fact, I would go so far as to say that once you begin to tangle with the world you can get pretty busy, because it’s unfathomably wicked.)
And then the blog began to sprawl further into commentary on news and politics.
Pretty soon, it also contained well over four hundred historical observations, making it pretty unweildy. The chief interface for finding anything was Google, rather than the display structure of the site.
And, besides, in the end, the location-patterns registering on my sitemeter suggested that its biggest fans were far-right Christian think tanks.
So it was time to move on.
LoG was a website before it was blog, and now, it’s changing again with the times. I’m currently beginning to use the Dojo Toolkit to serve up content from a rudimentry database of historical facts.
The user-interface has been reconfigured as a kind of time machine for persons, places, and dates that represent the chains of cause and effect which run history. The UI will sit there solid and reliable in a static shell while the data flows into the “ajax” slots. (Look, Ma, I’m doing client-side Ajax!)
To return to the issue of community, though, this is all very unsettled right now. I don’t know whether we shall ever be able to build our new cybercity of Friends, invincible to attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth.
But I’m still out there, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing…
The connections I’ve made, however, with the help of the blog, are precious to me.
Ductile anchors, so to speak. Gossamer threads… I hope they hold.

By: Liz Opp

Liz Opp — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:12:35 +0000

Y’know, Martin, I feel like I should comment here, but I find myself unusually quiet… or else a post might be in the making and I’m keeping my thoughts to myself!
Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up

By: Aj

Aj — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:20:50 +0000

I've noticed that it's not just an angry Quaker blogosphere, or an angry blogosphere in general, but rather a culture seriously marked by anger. For me, anger is usually a defense mechanism responding to when folks trigger my woundings: I recognize it's a place where I need some serious healing, where I need to experience God's peace, and I hope to help others find that as well. I wonder if that should be part of our Quaker testimony as well . . . peace as in no war and peace as in a whole spirit. . . . I, too, tend to find myself drawn to the more authentic postings rather than the most informative or structured or branch-oriented. I want to hear peoples' stories, journeys, where they are finding God reaching out and embracing them. I want this to be a worshipful experience rather than a consumeristic one: when I find myself anxious that I'm not reading enough or missing out on something, it's time to take a step back. Thanks for writing this post (and working in a random title - nice!).