Thing 4: Blogging Begins with Reading

Post 3: Responses to Blogs I read.

Once upon a time, I was asked to be a “timer” for a series of One-Act Plays that were happening at our school. All I had to do was sit, sometimes in the audience, sometimes backstage, with a stopwatch in hand, timing the play. I was witness to many works that day—absurdist dramadies, heart-wrenching tragedies, and one little number I like to call “Kabuki Hamlet”.
Anyone who has read Hamlet, or watched the uncut Branaugh version, knows that Hamlet, even if the actors are rushing their lines, takes about 4 hours to perform. These kids had 40 minutes.

They did it—the entire Hamlet in 40 minutes. Well not the entire Hamlet, some of it was cut out, like almost two-thirds, but the gist was there, I guess.

You might be wondering what the heck this little tale has to do with blogging. Bear with me.

I could be commenting on how it’s all the rage, and the teachers who aren’t doing it should be flogged and we aren’t really teachers if we aren’t doing this, and someone who insisted a blog be required reading for High School English teachers (I read that as a “or else” statement--fill in flogging rhymes with blogging, get it? here).

Or I could touch upon the poor dude from the bullying site whose own site was ransacked by malicious self-righteous idiots who were set upon him, like trained dogs, by some editor at Wired magazine. I would, were I to do that, bring up an old Law and Order where some guy was killed because someone put up a hate fan site and well, killing him was then justified since he was some sort of zealot, as was the guy who put up the hate site. Where indeed does the responsibility reside?

But it was easier for me to tell the Kabuki Hamlet story because it sums up all the other arguments and points I would like to stress. Case in point.

Hamlet is a long play, and while some of the scenes may seem superfluous, they, in total, add to the whole product. Hamlet has some very comical scenes in it, especially where Polonius is concerned, but because they don’t lend themselves directly to the obvious plot, though they are terribly important to the overall read, they are the first scenes excised from the work when editing. What’s left after this wholesale chopping is 40 minutes of ?

In short, just because you CAN perform Hamlet in 40 minutes doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

And I think of blogging this way: it’s easy to attack in writing; it’s easy to say offensive things and then use the 1st amendment for protection; it’s easy, and I suppose confidence building to imagine that your words are so important the whole world must be exposed to them. Perhaps blogging has taken the place of the earth in the center of the universe. Once that theory was disproved (sorry if you thought it still was) we needed something to fill that void of being the center of the universe, and voila, we are important again.

Maybe when we teach kids the responsibility which comes with blogging, we should think about teaching them a little humility as well . . .

Oh, and the Kabuki Hamlet production was disqualified--they used too much fabric in their costumes and their sets.