published 2020-07-19
It's time to take another crack at blogging. The last time was 2009–2012. This time, rather than trying to start a separate blog for each different interest — a practice that last time resulted in having 20 blogs with one post each — this time the plan is to have one blog and put everything I have to say there. It's simpler that way.
I am planning to post under my own name at seanharrison.org. In effect, I am the brand — and why not? I, the individual, am indeed the only thing that brings together all of my music, technology, photography, languages, publishing, spiritual writing, and everything else that I have been interested in during my not-quite-50 years.
There are challenges in doing it this way. For one, I would not want to publish today everything I have said, written, thought, and published over the years. There is some pretty immature stuff out there, and I have changed a lot over the past 25 years. So I am not going to port to this blog everything that I've written elsewhere in the past. Some of it might come over. Eventually. When it does, I might post it with the original date as well as the current date, with a note about when it was first published and what has changed since then. And I'll certainly edit it so that it is up to my current standards.
I can envision looking back from the future at what I publish now and wanting to remove content that no longer reflects my future-current thinking. If that situation arises, I'm not yet sure how I'll handle it. I would like to think that I will leave it alone and post my future-current thoughts separately, perhaps with an editor's note on each post. There comes a point when one needs to be an adult and own everything ones says, without regrets, even if one's thinking changes.
Another challenge of blogging all in one place, when one has widely varying interests, is that people who want to read what I've written in one area might have no interest at all in reading what I have written in another area. It isn't hard to imagine that many of my technology colleagues will have no interest whatsoever in reading my sermons, for example. Here's how I intend to solve that challenge: All content will go into separate sections, so it will be possible for people to visit the site and read one of the sections without ever seeing the content in the other sections.
It's possible that one of those sections will gather enough of a community that others want to begin publishing there as well. If that happens, then this site can give birth to others. For example, there might well be many who would like to contribute to a blog on "technology without holy grails" (Postgrails). I can envision that section becoming its own site in the future. But for now, it's more complicated to do that. I need to keep things as simple as they can be, until it's clear that something more is needed.
It's also possible that there will be the opposite problem: There might be readers or potential readers who find one section so hostile that it cancels everything else. Cancel culture is a real and growing problem. But the more I've thought about this, the less it makes sense to live in apprehension of what people might think, or to try to separate myself from myself (which doesn't work anyway). Instead, it makes sense just to thoughtfully say, There are many ways to think, but many people live lives of unexamined orthodox privilege. If what I have said falls beyond the pale, I hope you will treat me with the same forebearance and patience that you would like to be treated with, if it turned out that your point of view were the one that fell outside of today's orthodoxy.
So, sections it is, on one site, under my own name. As someone who has pursued so many completely different interests in my short life, this feels like the most psychologically integrating thing that I have ever set out to do. I'm looking forward to it. I hope you will enjoy and benefit from reading it (or whatever portion of it you choose).