On Beginning to Blog: A Catholic Agonism

This is my first ever "entry" on a blog, and while I am happy to be doing so in such good company, my happiness is not untethered from an ongoing ambivalence about the blogosphere in particular, and the Internet in general. As the recent book _Cult of the Amateur_ (Doubleday, 2007), by Andrew Keen, reports, "there are fifty-three million blogs on the Internet." He suggests that "Blogging has become such a mania that a new blog is being created every second of every minute of every hour of every day. We are blogging with monkeylike shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives." (p. 3) Keen is polemical about the whole business, inveighing that "Blogs have become so dizzingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary." (p. 3) I’m sure that’s an overstatement, but it might also be that dogpiled in the polemic is a worthy spiritual question: what sort of availability for self and others is fashioned in and through the writing and reading of blogs in general, and our use of the Internet in particular? Educated Catholics are schooled again and again in Catholicism’s connatural regard for "mediations," with a basic lesson being that availability to God is always the undergoing of an intermediary. I am aware of one Catholic publisher who recently called a ’time-out’ on Internet use at the office, having discovered that blogging, emailing, and the like -- while all related to ’work’, to be sure -- were not contributing to a sense of employees being present to their work in ways that they were before the Internet. People were feeling that the Internet was just taking up too much creative time in the day. So I blog now as one who wonders how to live with these mediations, which take up (by ’choice’ and by ’necessity’) parcels of time unimaginable to me even 10 years ago (and I have been on the Internet since 1988, and so have been through its iterations for some time). There are other technological ’mediations’ in my everyday life that I am able to live with, without this ’Catholic agonism’, but blogs and the Internet are an ongoing source of unease for me. (I also write this as someone who has, with an unalloyed joy analogous to that of the beatific vision, spent an inordinate of time watching 1980s rock videos on YouTube. In this, I am not alone among ’young’ theologians, though I will not give names away!) I wonder if others who, like me, conduct so much of their business, maintain so many of their friendships, and relate to so many of their students and colleagues, on the Internet, also share this unease, and whether there are interesting and helpful things to be said about it theologically. To use Ignatian language, I wonder again and again whether I am simply not ’composing the place’ of my Internet time well enough to either house or critique my own practice. Tom Beaudoin