Blogs and Free Time

Fred, Sister Edith and I visited this last weekend at the Exercises as fellow bloggers. We very briefly talked about this common blog. I liked what Fred had to say about it, that we have to make the effort to stay together. He also had the great idea that one of us post a challenge to kick off a discussion, rather than just dropping in various pieces.

How about a postmodern question to give this blog a kick? Blogging is something of a disreputable activity. It is time stolen from Responsibilities. It's for people with Egos. It's at best an Outlet.

Last night I received this email at my Flickr account.

Hello,

I love many of the pictures that you share on Filckr and find inspiration though them, and also a simple tranquility that soothes me and brings comfort on those 'crazy zanny' days. :)

I have a question though, what is Communion and Liberation?

Thanks,
Hope

Normally, we endure and perhaps buy into a disdain for a medium which supposedly supplants human contact. Of course, the print medium has been used from the time the Gospels were committed to writing and continues to be a major evangelization tool of the Church. And learning was very limited before the printing press. Is it that blogs are so democratic and wide-ranging in value from the illiterate to the erudite? And we have to acknowledge an alarming tendency to escape on the internet to avoid the real thing. On the other hand, the nature of blogs and similar sites offers far more give-and-take between author/creator and reader/viewer than in traditional media.

I was stopped by this message. I have the usual confusion about this strange occupation which is work. Either I think of writing and photography as a way to assert my talents with the other tasks of life endured as necessary tedium, or contradictorily I think of (or use) it as an escape.

Fr. Giussani says we know what a person is like by how they spend their free time. So what's with this blogging and such that takes up so much free time?