Just a Blog

I set up this blog  around 6 years ago, not really knowing what to do with it. I wasn't really into 'blogging', and had always been suspicious of the term, and the lexical ugliness of the word and its offshoots - blogging, blogger, blogosphere, etc.

Since 2006, I've been using WordPress as a content management system for The Wild East Magazine and other websites in my network. It has proven versatile, and is far more than a blog platform. Today it can support magazines, newspapers, photo galleries, and many more applications.

I have six websites to actively maintain, and 5 of them are managed using WordPress. Over the years, I have learned to install themes, tweak them, make child themes, and sometimes get into the php. I am resistant to computer code. I don't like doing it. Don't get me wrong; I appreciate coding, and like what it can do. I just want to write using a human language, rather than learning how to communicate with machines, bots, and other non-human user-agents.

Last year, at this time, I started to sacrifice the time I spent working on my WordPress sites to pay attention to my long-neglected old website Atherton Tableland Netguide which was originally made using HTML and CSS. Sometimes, as I crawl through the hundreds of pages on that site, like a human web-bot, updating design and content, I think 'this would be much easier if I used php.' But I don't want to do that.

When you consider digital applications, they are a reflection of the physical world. Automation and standardization are desirable attributes in the world of economics. The benefits of automation and standardization can be carried over into the information economy, and they have been much. Being human, however, is more than a matter of being economic, efficient, automated, and standardized.

Cockroaches are one of the most efficient lifeforms on our planet. In fact, most species on earth could be categorized as more efficient than humans. Can you think of a particular species that is less efficient than ours?

The more simple the life-form, the more automated the responses: hence we call our new digital user-agents, web-crawlers and spiders after well-established species that preceded us by hundreds of millions of years, and bots as a new digital version of our invertebrate ancestors. We are just attempting to re-invent the wheel.

There is still a place for art in this world, both online, and in the physical world we inhabit. As artists, we can make use of improvements in efficiency; but automation and standardization? What value are these?