I’ve read that a couple of blogs are closing their comment streams. The rationale in doing this merely confirms what we already know that human beings are complex and can be tricky to encounter and deal with. People can be a great deal more vicious online and hide behind anon tags. Or is it that people are generally just as vicious in flesh, and merely suppressing the urge to express it!

Lately I have found online reading can be a noisy experience if you’re not discerning. I am referring more to social networking where one must trawl through an enormous amount of positioning and senseless blubbing to find the one tweet that ignites an interest or is very funny or is David Lynch making another of his lovely woodwork projects or the much longed for, but rare as rain currently, Channel 4’s Alex Thomson tweeting on his vegetable plants.

If anything I blog more and use social networking less or use blogging to similar effect. The moment to moment thing can be compelling with twitter and I prefer to import that to my blog. But my mind is in a hefty reading mode at present and there are so many texts I want to devour in their entirety that I can’t accommodate the twit factor.

One thing that puzzles me is if the urge is to blog, why per se would you expect people only to listen and not formulate their own thoughts or response to what you’ve written? Isn’t this a sermon?  An oration? If it’s a round of applause you’re looking for I am not sure blogging is where you find it. If anything blogging is a celebration of democracy and equal access and the right to speak over the final, lauded word.