Starting Up - An Introduction to Introductions.

It would be a cliché to say that this blog will try to avoid all clichés. It would be hypocritical to proclaim such a thing, although, I have yet to meet anyone that was not in some way a hypocrite. As a communicative form, blogs tend to be written by college/university educated young professionals looking to show off their newly acquired writing skills and maturity to the world. They flaunt their lives, as if others have none, and consider their opinions to be definitive. Unlike a personal diary, there’s a self-righteous narcissism involved in writing a blog for the public that I dislike. Nonetheless I cannot deny that I am myself one of these young twenty somethings, who has recently (well a year ago) completed a masters degree, and have begun writing this with no agenda other than to flaunt the modest talents and interests of my life with the hope that they might resonate and appeal to an audience. I will do my best to eradicate any form of pretension, but I would be a hypocrite if I said I was not one of those twenty somethings trying to justify their interests to the world, and,  consequently, criticized my own position.

Another issue of blogging is that it has become passe. The proliferation of users, those young twenty somethings, has affected overall perceptions of the form as something general and, therefore, trivial. Indeed, one of the topics I hope to discuss on this blog is the difficulty for ideas/artists/movements to change from small, yet dedicated, followings; to popular and mainstream audiences, as well as their mutual impact. I myself have become disillusioned with several social media platforms because of the insignificance caused by their mainstream appeal.

So why should you read this blog? I can’t make you, and, as I hope to argue in another planned article, believe you cannot force people to learn or to like anything they do not want to. I can only offer an outline of what I plan to do, and you can decide for yourself. In short, I hope to provide ideas that will lead you to form your own opinion on a matter, or to discover something new. A new topic or artist, and within that, a new way of thinking or of looking at things. Through an article you may become curious about Jazz, sympathise with the unemployed, consider techniques in art and music, or some other point of intrigue. I have no doubt that some of these ideas will have occurred to you, or may be expressed in other ways elsewhere. Nonetheless, I have always felt that the more paths leading to a good subject area the better, and, surely the flux of opinion adds merit to a subject rather than detracts from it. For my own benefit, I will gain a chance to re-sharpen my writing skills, express ideas and musings, and, as a musician, post the occasional song; at least when I can hold one together. What I hope it will do, at the very least, is give the reader the end of a thread to an idea or an issue that they can pursue and unravel themselves, and on their own initiative. That it will lead to something that they might not have considered otherwise, or contribute to something that is already of interest to them.