Bloggers and Urinals

A postcard-sized notice appeared in the university toilets:

PLEASE DO NOT PUT CHEWING GUM IN THE URINALS

Next time I went, I took a pen, and, there being no one else around, added:

It makes it go hard and taste pissy.

I was a fifty-five year-old lecturer at the time.

I know! It was shameful. Cleaning the men’s urinals must rank amongst the most unpleasant jobs in the world. But what I am most ashamed about is that it was not entirely original. It echoes an item in Nigel Rees’s book Graffiti about cigarette ends becoming soggy and difficult to light. 

Yesterday’s post ended by recalling a similar incident from my student days when someone added a humorous comment to a humorous news sheet I had pinned to notice board. Who was the humourist in that case, me, or the person who made the undeniably funnier enhancement?

Which brings us to an issue that lies somewhere in between a simple dispute about terminology and a matter of deep philosophical importance of infinite significance to the future of humanity. What is a blogger?

Is a blogger only someone who posts blog posts, or can someone who comments but does not have a blog of their own also be considered a blogger?

It might not be as simple as it looks. It differs from writer and reader. What about blog writers whose posts consist of only a brief sentence or image but attract huge amounts of debate or comment? What about blog writers who do not allow comments? What if they allow only some comments? What if they never respond to comments or never comment on other blogs?

As for those who do comment, what if they make only brief or trivial remarks, or produce long erudite rejoinders that dwarf the original post and even take the subject off in a different direction?

This is something else I touched on yesterday. Rachel said that blog commentators without blogs were most definitely not bloggers. They are more like concert audiences or football spectators who could not in themselves (in that role) be considered to be musicians or footballers, even when their presence or participation alters the performances of the musicians and footballers on the stage and pitch, and even though the crowd is part of the football match experience.

I think there is more to it. When you go to a concert you don’t take your own instrument and play along, or at a football match you can’t run on to the pitch and help your team out (even though you know you could do better). But there are events at which large numbers of musicians play or sing together. Admittedly, it is not like singalong showing of ‘The Sound of Music’ where you dress up as Maria von Trapp (even the men), stand up, throw out your arms and join in with “The hills are alive …” as loud as you can. Cinemagoers are not film makers.

However, it seems to me that blog commentators are also a bit like members of facebook groups where the initial stimulus can be secondary to the responses. What, then, is a ‘facebooker’? Can you be a blogger on facebook?

If only life were simple. I feel truly in the urinals for arguing about it.