Suburban Blogging

In his post, Dear Internets: It's Not You, It's Me, long term blogger Ernie Hsiung of little. yellow. different talks of the dissolution of the golden age of blogging. Arriving at such a post, haphazardly, after half a bottle of red wine on a suburban Saturday night, and even later in the blogging game, is both disheartening and illuminating.

Ernie, from what I can gather, has been blogging since about 2000. Back in 2000 I was trying to hammer out a film industry career and all I knew of the internet was the email provider I used to send off my CVs and receive daily instructions from my film director boss. Back then a colleague also described me as 'mainstream', a moniker that horrified the girl in me who had once flounced around university in tie-dye, hoping she was radical.

Lately I've been very in touch with that 19 year old (listening to Happy Rhodes, remembering Coming Out and a gap year in India) and increasingly I wonder if I did her justice. Wouldn't she have embraced the genesis of blogging?

But then I realise that, actually, painfully, she didn't.

Which begs the question: what am I doing here now? Is this just yet another thirty-something, middle-class, semi erudite, moderately poetic (embarrassingly existential) no-man's land in cyberspace? Because it's what friends talk about at dinner parties? And does it matter, anyway? I'm not doing it for the kudos. Am I?

There's nothing wrong with mainstream, of course, but in truth I think we all hope it's a term that applies to other people, not ourselves.