I blog therefore I am

Hi Everyone

The French philosopher Rene Descartes is quite famous for his phrase “I think therefore I am”. I just realized that my blog about innovation in India was my 300^th blog post. For me, that is a huge achievement. For others, that is less than what they do in a year, maybe even in a month. For today’s modern people it seems like you need to have at least one blog in order to be someone. If you don’t blog, you don’t exist. That’s why I think this heading is quite good. I do blog, so I am (someone). The net indeed have been a vital instrument in bringing information to people in just a blink of an eye. Descartes on the other hand, could only do it the hard way; by writing his rich ideas on paper.

After having reached 300 blog posts I got a bit in a philosophical mode myself, and started to think a bit about why blogging? Here in Norway Cecilie Staude and Svein Tore Marthinsen have just published a book about the use of social media. And before you start to laugh about a book on paper about social media I can tell you that the book is really good. Anyone who understands Norwegian should read it!

Part of being a blogger is to read other peoples blogs. I have realized that blogging seems to be something “everyone” does these days. I don’t have any official numbers about how many bloggers there are in Norway as of now, but some statistics I could find indicates that there are more than 500.000, which means that one out of ten Norwegian do have a blog!

When I look at the different blogs, I find that some of them are quite bad. Or should I rather say incomplete? If you create a blog and then just put up one or two blog posts why do it at all? These blogs just basically end up as “digital trash”. Hardly anyone will read them. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said that “language speaks”. We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. If he had lived today he would quite surely have said that we speak when we blog. A blog is a way to express your feelings and meanings. What you write and how you do it is less important.

Staude and Marthinsen say that in order to succeed in social media, you need to have a strategy about it. Before I started to blog, I had a discussion with my dad regarding it. We discussed a bit who should be my audience and if I should write in English or in Norwegian. At that time the idea was to write for my friends. We still decided that the language should be English, so that my foreign friends could also understand it. The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that words has its own context. The meaning of a word, according to him, takes its meaning from the use of it. Words are understod different(ly) by different people.  This is maybe something more people should think about when they write blogs. Writing something is mostly quite easy. But to get people to really understand what you want to communicate is completely different and much more difficult.

Little did I knew (at)that time, that my blog would be read from people all over the world, and that most of my readers would actually be Indians that I have never met, and that I will most probably never meet. This is maybe one of the really fascinating things about having a blog. You never know who will be the readers and who will comment on it.

What about Descartes? Would he have used social media today?  Well. He is at least on Facebook. But I hardly think this is something done by him. It seems like he is quite modern and (would) have outsourced that part.

Talk to you soon

Karsten