Today, in Milan, the sun turned green! Yes, that’s right, it was only a slight hue of green, but green it was. It was very strange walking around in this slightly green light. It seemed to make the leaves on the trees (yes we have a lot of them in Milan although how they survive in the pollution beats me) much greener than normal. Walking around, people were just staring up towards the sun or there with their hands in front of them, examining them, as if they had some dread disease. It was quite freaky, just like some sort of Science Fiction film. Except that we were here and it wasn’t some film set.
It lasted about 5 minutes and there was great relief when it went back to normal.
My blog is a private blog. It’s for my private use and it allows me to say what I want to say, to express my thoughts and opinions. It’s also there because we no longer live in the UK and it allows friends to see what’s been happening to us.
Comments are moderated. That’s the way it is. I make no excuse for it. If you don’t like that, then don’t read the blog. I’m really not interested in the number of hits I get because I’m not really writing for you (unless you’re one of my friends) but for me. And it’s not because I’m self-centred (although I may be) but because I used to find it so difficult to write about everything that happened during the year, my memory being, well, quite frankly, crap. So I would start writing a newsletter (or letters) about November and then was lucky if I finished them before Christmas, so everyone’s cards were late and/or I felt guilty for not including all the news.
So, this blog started off a) to inform my friends and b) to explain some of the differences between Italians and the British, things that aren’t obvious when you come for a holiday and things that surprised me when I came to live here.
It’s now developed, a little, to allow me to post my opinions and thoughts on a variety of things but, as you can see if you read the posts, mostly it’s much as it was intended to be.
But I have been a bit concerned, recently, about the freedom that exists within the blogosphere and how long that is likely to last.
We all know, from the press, how China clamps down on blogs and people speaking their mind. Recently, someone was convicted in court somewhere else for posting things that were anti-whatever-country-it-was (Egypt, I think).
And, like conversation, blogging is opinion or, rather, YOUR opinion or YOUR experience. May it continue always so, although I think it may not, which is a great shame. I cannot believe that governments, corporations or, even, the blogging community will allow it to remain so, since it means that people can write what they want and that may involve truth (or lies) that we don’t wish to read.
Now here is what happens when one ignorant person writes something which will be read by a lot of (ignorant?) people who, probably, think it’s true when, in fact, the blogger was not as depicted. It’s a particularly well written piece but the fact that just short of 100,000 people (source) in the UK will believe the rubbish that was written, scares me. It should also scare the whole blogosphere and then, after they’ve been to the toilet, they should think, very carefully, about jumping on any bandwagons without complete understanding of all facts. Just because something is written down (in blogs, newspapers, history books, etc.) DOESN’T MAKE IT FACT!
I am also reminded of the film Gossip. Not a really great film, but it has some good points. One of those is that people (in general) will believe anything particularly if it is considered a secret, comes via someone they know or respect and has the possibility of being true – even if the person hearing it says something like ‘No, I can’t believe that’. And then they will tell others and so it will go. So, the internet blogosphere is like a gossip machine. The trouble is determining what is fact, what is fiction and what is a bit of both. And it’s not possible to tell. After all, the newspapers are not much better at determining truth from fiction and there are often apologies for having printed things that were untrue. And, they are ‘regulated’ whereas blogs aren’t. But, does that mean we should have blogs regulated as the rest of the media? Does everyone suddenly become responsible for what they write? Well, yes, but it’s their opinion rather than actual fact and, in fact, there should be a global warning for all blogs that the blog contains information that may, or may not, be true.
If H. G. Wells had been writing War of the Worlds now, or if Orson Welles/Howard Koch were to write the script now, rather than 1938, I wonder what medium they would choose? I suspect that, probably, a choice of medium would have been a blog (as long as they had a few friends doing similar blogs) although its effect may have only been a few days or a few hours but I can imagine, with the correct ‘marketing’ something like that would have worked in the blogosphere now, in much the same way as it did for radio then.
So, perhaps, everything we read on the internet is just smoke and mirrors. If not everything, then many things? And how do you sort out what is true?
So, the sun wasn’t green. But then, unless you live in Milan, how the hell would you know? In fact, maybe it was and me saying it wasn’t is the lie? Or, maybe it will be green tomorrow and I just have a premonition? Or, maybe it’s always green in Milan …………….?