What a better way of starting the year (and the decade?) than by starting a new blog? It is actually my first personal blog ever, and I feel I should probably explain in this (its first) post why now (not before, not later), why the name, and what this is about.
Let’s start with the timing. I’ve always felt that having a blog (or a Facebook profile, or a Twitter account) gives you the opportunity to do things (communicate, get in touch with, express yourself, you name it) that are not possible without it. But I also feel that with this opportunity comes a certain responsibility. Namely, I feel I need to keep the “conversation” alive and I feel that whatever it is I write should have some value to people other than me. The first issue, keeping the conversation alive, can be seen as planting a seed and acquiring the responsibility of watering and nurturing it so that it turns into a healthy plant. I’ve always been terrible with plants and I have always thought I would be equally terrible at nurturing a blog (and who needs another dried out blog?). However, this academic year I have been released of certain pressing and time-consuming obligations, which allows me more time to take care of plants like this. Regarding the second issue, the value of what is written: this is always difficult to assess from the point of view of whoever is writing it. But I try to follow the advice of Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso when he said that “only those words that are better than silence deserve to live”. To follow this advice in the age of digital communication is particularly hard (and I am not sure I will be able to), but after spending a few months as a fellow at the Berkman Center, surrounded by smart and interesting people, discussing and enacting very relevant ideas, I believe my chances are higher than ever before.
And this takes me to the second issue, the name. If a blog is like a plant, and the point is to write only those words that are better than silence (which coming from me would probably be few), I guess moss is a good candidate. Thus, what I hope I will be doing here is mossing a tiny portion of the blogosphere. (Besides, I always wanted to use that line from a Leonard Cohen song based on a poem by Federico García Lorca that goes “And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook / With the photographs there, and the moss”, and with this blog name I feel I can).
Finally, what will this blog be about? It’ll be about the issues I am thinking of these days, and they refer to the Internet, to communication and commercialization, to advertising and control. But that doesn’t mean that other issues will not come up (I am sure they will). I just hope you’ll like the moss.