A Word and My Agenda

Going into this, I told myself I wouldn't be posting "excuse" entries - that's my term for the posts that say, "Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but..."

But the thought occurred to me that this is the perfect blog for such entries - as many of them as I like, in fact - because they perfectly illustrate the Cyberculture. After all, my everyday is spent online, so whatever I do in general offers some glimpse into this culture. In actuality, this is really, really cool and I'm sorry I didn't see it before (a "can't see the forest for the trees" conundrum): blogging is a corruption of the term, "weblog," which came from "online journals" people began keeping (and sharing). When these Web-based diaries became popular in the late 1990s, many webmasters added their own "site diaries," or weblogs, which were usually just about what they were working on, what was coming-up, and how to work the site, etc. Soon, all online journals were referred to as "weblogs" and, ever true to the Cyberculture, quickly became abbreviated to 'blogs. Recently, the apostrophe has been dropped.

So, when you get right down to it, The Cyberculturalist is as true to the original concept as you are ever going to get: this is an online journal about life online - every, little thing I do or think about has some significance because it elaborates on the point!

Thus, I figured I would tell you what's going on:

A couple weeks back, the cyst on my wrist (that's not a lyric so just go with it) became too painful to handle. Though it is usually sore, it had gotten to where it was hurting all the time and it's from being online constantly, so I took the entire last week in April off. That is the longest I have been offline since 1999, when I moved into one of the roughest ghettos in Memphis, TN and was afraid to bring my computer over there (not a bad idea, by the by - there were at least three attempted break-ins in the six months I lived there!). Technically, I was also offline for about six months in 2005 because I had no phone, but I spent most all of my days working on my website and then uploading the finished product when I visited friends and relatives. It's definitely the longest I've been offline in the last three years, at any rate.

And I wasn't completely offline the entire time; I still posted a handful of entries on The Rundown (which, FYI, is where you can always find me because it gets the most hits of all the site), checked my e-mail, and so on. In March, I missed almost an entire two weeks due to a stomach virus, as well.

I will have to have the cyst excised, which means I'll be out for another several days when that goes down, but now that Blogger supports future posts, that won't be a problem; I'll draft and schedule a slew of entries so that you'll never know I'm gone.

What I am going to do - because The Cyberculturalist is as much an historical document (a real piece of journalism, actually) as a simple blog - is go back through and backdate several posts between now and when last I posted. This is "cheating," but I bookmarked a lot of articles to get to here when I wasn't actively blogging, so technically, had I been in better health, they would have appeared on-time. That out of the way, I accept that some of the things I may say in these backdated posts are going to be tainted by hindsight, but I will try to keep it to a minimum and add a comment when I feel it appropriate; if I say, "I told you so," I really did know - or think - it at the time I read the article.

But I'm trying to get back in the saddle across the boards, so enjoy!

© C Harris Lynn, 2008