Soccer Dad began a thread in which he discusses how he became a blogger. It was interesting to read and so I decided that I might add my own story to this.
I began by participating in chat rooms. It was the early ’90s and I was enthralled with the idea that I could speak with people around the world with such ease and in real time. I remember using AOL. If I am not mistaken I was on a plan in which I received a small number of hours for about $25 a month and then was required to pay overage fees. It was fairly similar to the current cellphone plans.
If I wanted to I could make this a really detailed and longer post but why bore the audience. I graduated from the chat rooms to message boards. There was a period of time that I was exceptionally active on the CNN boards and to a lesser extent on the ABC and New York Times.
I learned a lot about the Net and how people behaved. I posted under my real name because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. But I soon learned that there were people who would use their keyboards to attack those that disagreed with them with incredible vehemence. The nastiness was such that I was concerned that using my name might bite me in the ass so I stopped.
It has been many years since I was on those boards. I have had some mixed experiences on various boards since then. I stopped hanging around them because the nastiness wore me out. In the interest of full disclosure I participated in some of that. I have a decent command of the language and I found it to be easy to respond and I did.
I am not ashamed nor proud of those moments. I learned from it all.
So here we are at the big reveal,what made Jack decide to start blogging. In truth I don’t remember there being any one thing. I just decided that I wanted a new outlet and thought that blogging might be that.
If you are interested in more you might want to read about why I blog.
ReadersDigest Version:
Read blogs for a few years, commented once in a while. Left outreach/communal work after 12 yrs and joined the private sector. Was an avid journal writer until about 4 years ago when my second childw as born. Wanted to get back into writing on a regular basis. Looked to fill that void of attempting to add some more meaning to my time outside of office hours…started posting some ideas and thought as an expression of my Avodah. Great question.
Godol Hador’s comments section became insufficient for the things I wanted to say. 🙂
I used to post on newsgroups alot, but mostly they were either tech support boards (“why did my computer stop working”) or computer gaming boards (“why did this game kill my computer”) or the Babylon 5 board (“why did the Narn guy kill the Centauri guy”).
I also used my real name, and also got flamed on more than one occasion. I lost a lot of sleep and appetite over some particularly nasty threads and I was not sad to say goodbuy to the newsgroups.
Ok Snoopy.
I started blogging because a certain monkey gave me the idea.
“But I soon learned that there were people who would use their keyboards to attack those that disagreed with them with incredible vehemence.”
You don’t have to mention our blog at every opportunity, you know, Jack.
Oh, and if you still insist, please add a link 😉