What kind of blog is it? Is the question that inevitably follows the statement I blog. And one that I find somewhat difficult to answer.
This week I came across an article on The Guardian that proffered four blogging archetypes: The educator, the observer, the polemicist and the magpie. Basically the educator is the expert, the observer offers 'informed insight and analysis', the polemicist is 'provocative, opinionated and contrarian' and the magpie is the scavenger of the internet, curating content from around the web but offering insight and opinion alongside it.
I'm no expert, much too uniformed and opinionated to be an observer yet not quite opinionated enough to be a polemicist. Which leaves magpie.
The word magpie evokes images of both a black and white bird, and a person who somewhat secretly and oftentimes to their own detriment collects things in a manner that would see them not out of place on one of those American hoarding tv shows. She hoarded those issues of Vogue like a magpie, etc.
But, there is something else to the idea of the magpie that goes hand in hand with the phenomenon that is blogging and the interwebs. Because there is a ridiculous amount of interesting stories and thoughts and pictures and video and music that this constant inter connective telecommunication has opened up. And being able to trawl and discover and then having a space to share those things - a space with more room than various social media channels - a space to catalogue your online adventures in a way that feels both intimate and wide ranging and also a way that feels current but simultaneously forever. I mean, this blog will still be around in a thousand years, right? Anthropologists will read it and dissect it and try to determine what life was like in 2014. Right? Maybe not.
I sometimes wonder if the way we share today, share even the most personal of feelings and thoughts and emotions, is indicative of a disjointed society. One where we don't know our neighbours or our local greengrocer. One where we could go all day without speaking words to another human being, but type thousands of words on a screen.
But I digress. What type of blogger am I? Well, I'm a magpie. What type of blog is this? A magpie nest, I guess. A quick perusal through my most recent posts here attests to that. I've long pondered whether expanding this blog from its initial incarnations, adding to the nest if you will, was the right thing to do in an internet society that almost demands you bag a niche. Now I know I'm a magpie, this pondering seem unimportant.
So next time someone asks me what I blog about, I'm going to say I blog about the magpie nest that is this life. I'm going to say I'm a magpie blogger.
kb xx