The time we were suddenly ported to the blogosphere, we knew that diaries were dinosaurs. Blogs weaned us off the bashful journal-keeping of school. But is blogging the new dinosaur?

Doc’s question is a rethink of the old romantic question Why do I write? In fact, once upon a TBR, it was asked as Why do I blog?

So, Why am I still at it? How apt can that get. It's the Twitter era. Let us count the ways.

But blogging is no dinosaur. It’s more like a giant panda.

At the heart of blogging for lowly mortals like us is a yearning for a voice, a conversation, a purpose. To that end, TBR is carrot.



We embraced blogging to fulfill the romance that our puny journals and letters could never provide. It's a sense that we can also write lit pieces after Don DeLillo's fashion, and, while we're at it, have an audience, too.

And yet, in the vast sea of texts, tweets, posts and microblogs that get re-twitted, re-posted and re-microblogged no end, blogs seem sooo – more-than-140-characters. Just too long for our Facebookitis and 2-nanosecond attention spans and infinitely tasked 2-bit memories.

What is then blogging’s place in our 1.5 hertz of scatterbrains now crammed with Facebooking and eyeballing?

Answer. Blogging has evolved into microblogging. As for the traditionally long essay-type ones, they said these follow Darwinian mechanics in that only the “fittest,” the most marketable, and the most interesting survive.

Answer. Meanwhile, we lowly mortals can only Facebook and eyeball so much.

Answer. And it could be much worse. For the less boring type of Homo interneticus – meaning, ehem, us busy doctors – regularly blogging in long form is a bit of a stretch. Blogging the moment has always been less urgent than the moment itself.

Answer. For example, after sawing off the ruined diabetic leg, after bringing to life the dead, after prescribing laughter to the half-dead, after the 1-month tour of duty and dropping dead, we don’t just get away from it all and hie off to, say, Sagada, only to spend a lot of time blogging in Sagada about being in Sagada. WTF. I mean, do we? Sure, a bit of microblogging here and there is forgivable. It doesn’t hurt to brag about it on your frenemy’s FB wall.

Which is like telling him/her where to target you with a uranium bomb.

Answer. On a personal level, blogging is way past its childish audience-seeking, voice-challenged ways. Alas, it remains true to the ideals of keeping a paper journal: being the antidote to downtime and the dramedies. Sometimes, it's better than being drunk.

Answer. But past the antidote, the Philippine Daily Idiot serves as the record-keeper of literature that is so ahead of its time it can only be celebrated posthumously – with a Nobel.


Answer. Who knows post-humans 1,000 years hence will find the Philippine Daily Idiot (PDI) in a time capsule or in the relic of a time-proof Google server.

Or they might even catch EM waves of PDI homing in from across the universe; you know, the waves being bounced back to earth by aliens from light-years away, who, in a Contact movie sort of way, received them from Earth, circa May 14, 2011.

Then, maybe post-humanity will adjudge PDI as – gasp – the archeological find of the millennium.

For my money. Haha!

Good morning.