I'm Roger Conway. If you ever landed on a place called "Roger Conway's New Monastic Individuals," I'm the same person. Including that blog, this will be my fourth blog—the first was "Fuel For Thought," then came NMI, then came "Cyberspace Glass House," and now this.
I'm an old guy who has learned, since I wrote so feverishly on those other sites, to restrain myself until I had something more orderly to write. Or perhaps to write more orderly. I closed down NMI after posting some 700+ observations and diatribes, because I felt I really didn't think I could comment anymore on what was happening and, more to the point, not happening in American society and culture. I suppose the effort had also begun feeling more compulsory and less necessary. I still feel that way...mostly. But at times, I see things and hear things that I just need to comment on—they're either flagrantly banal, flagrantly inane, flagrantly dangerous and/or just flagrant. Mostly, I guess, I just can't understand the kinds of things that capture the attention of millions of Americans. Why are they curious about the Kardashians? Why do they prefer screaming singers instead of mellifluous singers? Why do they prefer power walking listening to headphones and shutting out nature rather than strolling to the sounds of nature? Stuff like that.
For example, currently the 24/7 media circus seems befuddled by the swings taking place in the polling data in the "race" for the presidency. I have a simple answer: None of the candidates exemplifies presidentiality—sorry, that's another thing I do; when I can't come up with a precise word to communicate my thought, I create a word for it, usually some sort of clumsy neologism. In any case, this is the kind of thing that gets me started. My hope is that my broadcasting it might tweak some surfer out there into thinking about it, agreeing or disagreeing and floating that response through one of the various "social" media—the quotation marks indicating my feeling about the phrase "social media," namely that it does not socialize us but rather sorts us into comforting nodes of mutual assent—which just might get other people thinking.
That's really my purpose. Just to get us thinking again. Having spent my professional life trying to get people to want to learn to communicate, I've always held that writing and speaking should have the purpose of communication, not the purpose of self-expression. Self-expression is what one does by going into the woods and shouting into the wind. So-called creative writing, by the way, is also not self-expression if done sincerely.
So let's have a go at this thinking and see what happens. At the very least, it will keep me aware of language, which has always amazed me.
I'm an old guy who has learned, since I wrote so feverishly on those other sites, to restrain myself until I had something more orderly to write. Or perhaps to write more orderly. I closed down NMI after posting some 700+ observations and diatribes, because I felt I really didn't think I could comment anymore on what was happening and, more to the point, not happening in American society and culture. I suppose the effort had also begun feeling more compulsory and less necessary. I still feel that way...mostly. But at times, I see things and hear things that I just need to comment on—they're either flagrantly banal, flagrantly inane, flagrantly dangerous and/or just flagrant. Mostly, I guess, I just can't understand the kinds of things that capture the attention of millions of Americans. Why are they curious about the Kardashians? Why do they prefer screaming singers instead of mellifluous singers? Why do they prefer power walking listening to headphones and shutting out nature rather than strolling to the sounds of nature? Stuff like that.
For example, currently the 24/7 media circus seems befuddled by the swings taking place in the polling data in the "race" for the presidency. I have a simple answer: None of the candidates exemplifies presidentiality—sorry, that's another thing I do; when I can't come up with a precise word to communicate my thought, I create a word for it, usually some sort of clumsy neologism. In any case, this is the kind of thing that gets me started. My hope is that my broadcasting it might tweak some surfer out there into thinking about it, agreeing or disagreeing and floating that response through one of the various "social" media—the quotation marks indicating my feeling about the phrase "social media," namely that it does not socialize us but rather sorts us into comforting nodes of mutual assent—which just might get other people thinking.
That's really my purpose. Just to get us thinking again. Having spent my professional life trying to get people to want to learn to communicate, I've always held that writing and speaking should have the purpose of communication, not the purpose of self-expression. Self-expression is what one does by going into the woods and shouting into the wind. So-called creative writing, by the way, is also not self-expression if done sincerely.
So let's have a go at this thinking and see what happens. At the very least, it will keep me aware of language, which has always amazed me.
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