I saw on a technology show that there are far fewer men who blog than women. The most prolific writers are females between the ages of fourteen and thirty. Only 28 percent of all bloggers are male. Only 8 percent are above the age of forty. Those figures threw me for a loop. In an age when so many people talk about the communication revolution and the "information age", I would have thought the numbers would be more or less even across the board.
I shouldn't be too surprised though. Generally speaking, guys don't have a great track record for writing things down. It is usually the extraordinary or creative men who leave a written account of themselves of any kind. Men write biographies. They keep journals of daily facts and events. (Never, ever call it a diary to a guys face.) The average working man doesn't deal with the written word more than to read the newspaper. The educated ones even leave the sports page.
I'm a firm believer in the idea that people should express what they think more often. Which isn't to say that they should tear into a subject and write down a whole lot of prejudiced or opinionated nonsense. When thoughts get confined to one person, opportunities are lost. Where would we be if men like Plato and Charles Dickens had kept things to themselves? Where would we be if Leonardo DaVinci hadn't been quite so secretive with his journals?
I have browsed through the blogs before, and found some very interesting information. I saw one devoted entirely to the art of recycling. Another was all about pasta dishes. I still read the blog of Joe Ganci every day. His travel experience is a breath of fresh air to me. There is so much to be had out there, and to think that so few of us take advantage of what we have done or have to say, and leave it all undocumented. It makes you wonder why we bother having an Internet connected to so many homes.
It is a shame.
There is an old saying that history is written by the winners. I think that should now be that history is written by those who can be bothered.
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At one time it made sense that history was written by the winners. After all, the winners were generally those who were educated. Now, pretty much everyone in the western world has the oppertunity to be educated and its only a matter of whether or not they're willing.
To say that its those who bother is totally right. For some people writing a blog every day is so "nbd", but for others they have different focuses.
It's fun to worder what the world would be like without important thinkers and inventors. Just like its fun to wonder what life would be like if your parents hadn't made the decisions they made...
I've kind of gone off track.
Nice blog though. I enjoyed reading it. ^-^
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