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Obedient Blogging |
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Since the nineteenth century, the Church has told its members to seek their kindred dead so as to obtain Temple ordinances for them by proxy. Organizationally, the responsibility for this effort had long been located in the High Priests’ groups in each congregation. As an active participant in family history, I’d already been assigned (since 2006) to provide assistance to members who desired to learn how to take part in the effort. It was about this time that the Church came to call people so assigned “family history (and, later, Temple and family history) consultants.” So now I got the job, with the title to come later.
Those who were called to train and supervise us consultants recommended, at one point, that we should “have a ‘blog’.”1 This came as an entirely new notion to me, but I do try to be obedient to my leaders; so, I googled “blog” and consequently signed up on a site called “blogspot.com” and started accumulating “posts,” at first fairly energetically. You can find my accumulation thereof (still, in 2022) on the Internet at https://commensa.blogspot.com. At my solicitation, a few friends signed up as “followers”, but my offerings never ran any risk of “going viral’—nor, truth be told, of attracting any spontaneous interest at all in the “blogosphere.” I probably wouldn’t bother to include any of these effusions here, were it not for one particularly beloved “follower” who not only read my stuff but offered solid critiques. I’ll report our correspondence in September, when we get there in the chronology. My first entry appeared on June 4, 2010 and inquired, introspectively, “Do I really want a blog?” It’s reproduced on the next page. 1Justin took me to task for the scare quotes, assuring me that “blog”, though an decidedly ugly locution, was a very real thing, for anybody with any pretensions to being up-to-date. 2Some have suggested that this personal-history document partakes of the essential character of “bloggery;” perhaps so: it’s basically chronological, intended to endure, embedded in the Internet (however long that may endure) and to reflect the evolving thoughts, feelings and events of its author’s mortal existence. Apart from technology, not particularly distinct from a classical diary, journal, or autobiography. Unclear to me why it needs a distinctive appellation. And if so, why such an ugly one? |
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