blogs not equal

Over the past year, there had been lots of arguments over at the blogosphere. Arguments made by and against bloggers and commenters. Bloggers against bloggers. From issues as lame as a grammatical error to as grand as cleaning up the entire blogosphere.

Personally, I always believe in the constructive nature of arguments. It’s like adding salt and pepper to get that bland flavor a little more taste. It’s a simple science experiment where you let your thesis clash with an anti-thesis to get your synthesis. After all, at the end of an argument lies a more solid foundation for a new and better idea.

At least that was the supposed initial output.

We all blog for very different reasons.

Some bloggers have very simple reasons for doing it. They are just here to kill time and boredom. They expect a psychological release of whatever is bothering their life, their job, or probably the lack of those. They probably just wanted to learn new things, and don’t mind making friends along the way.

Some bloggers are here to make some money.

But then again, what’s wrong with making a living? I don’t see anything wrong with a blogger writing a paid post. It’s the same way as a broadsheet printing a paid ad or posting an article produced from a press release. Making money through blogging is a lot more decent than raiding the public coffers.

Some people blog because of their inner sense to propagate their own political agenda. Some are merely opinionated airheads, pretending to know issues with utter disregard for proven facts, and some are real experts trying to disprove a common myth that had over the years been accepted as fact.

Mark Twain is often misquoted as saying… “The trouble with most folks isn’t their ignorance. It’s knowing so many things that ain’t so.” This is very funny because, the quote itself wasn’t Twain’s. It was from a humorist who tried to show the irony of it.

We all have our own biases. As I have argued a lot over the years, however way we try to be balanced on our writing, we can always be swayed by our own political inclination based on our place on the social spectrum. Our own personal experiences make us more vulnerable to these.

And in the absence of a set of blogging standards or governing rules to implement such, we will all rant about stuff that we personally found offensive and rave about those things that we truly like.

Still, even when I was still writing for a national broadsheet, I always mock the Code of Ethics of Journalism. Not because it is wrong, but because it is not being followed. And I puke at those people who pledge at it and do otherwise. It is like doing the Panatang Makabayan and then spit at the Philippine flag afterwards.

I cringe at the hypocrisy of it all.

At the end of the day, blogging is all about freedom. It is about our freedom to say what we want to say without fear of persecution. It is our inherent right. But like most political rights, the exercise of it comes with a price. Responsibility.

We cannot fabricate things and slander just anybody we personally didn’t like. Yes, we could always call Bush an ass, but we cannot say that your neighbor Mr. Grumpy killed somebody unless you personally witnessed it or he was convicted of it.

While we have the right to say anything we want, some people beside ourselves have their own right too. You have to remember that the world is not always about you.

Arguments and debates are essentially good. But when it had been dragged on for too long that it had become a pissing contest and a contest of who has the bigger dick, it is just an exercise in futility. A total waste of energy.

We all are different. We blog for very different reasons. We can look at the very same picture and analyze it quite differently. In this sense, we as bloggers, and all our blogs, are not created equal.

We are all brought here not by intent, nor by common political ground. But by one thing alone…. our desire to connect.

Otherwise, why the hell publish it?