Admission of Submission, or a Stereotypical First Blog

How I desire to say that I was an unfortunate soul, left on the banks of obscurity with eyes shut tight against the technology of the previous few years – that I knew nothing of the blog until now.

Yet, I’d be lying if I said anything other than I had simply never had an interest in starting a blog, the global phenomenon that had reached my ears a thousand times before, but had been left to rot a thousand times over. It was only a few days ago when an Argentinean professor, José Luis Orihuela (ecuaderno.com/europe), was lecturing about the greatness of the almighty blog that I even contemplated the prospect of beginning one.

There was nothing entirely too spectacular in his presentation that would make lead to an epiphany of, "Oh! That's why people love blogs!" or, "Wow, my eyes have been opened! I had been blind, but now I see," and so on and so forth with a plethora of over-dramatic monologues and revelations; it was simply a PowerPoint presentation with a few slight grammatical errors that pointed out new media scenarios (“audience to user,” “one way to interactivity,” etc).

What made this presentation remarkable stemmed from the man’s identity rather than simply the content. Here was a man from a country completely foreign to me, speaking about the wonder of blogs as something completely commonplace and ordinary. Here was the extent of the blog looking me right in the face.

Although I had known it to be widespread, I had never really understood that it had gone that far – that literally anyone in the world with a computer could write in a blog. It was one of those revelations when one finally understands that although they might know about something, they really know nothing of it.

(And, to be more precise, the look in the face would probably be described better as a bitch-slap.)

Now, cue the epiphany: I realize now that the blogosphere is not simply a small collective of techno-savvy individuals bonded for the sake of spreading opinion and information; I realize now that there is a world here.

The endless possibilities of the blog are certainly more than enough to blow the mind of any non-blogger. But with a blown mind comes the potential to rebuild and start anew - the purpose of this first entry.

[With this blog, I intend to write about international communication (as it seems fitting seeing as I’m currently studying abroad), but also music reviews (because my editors at the university newspaper have asked me to continue to write them) as well as personal opinions.]