Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

To Know Ourselves

By Matt Loewen at Mar 25, 2009


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 To be civilized is to be removed from the relationships that sustain us, and to conform to predetermined rules and conventions. The city, one of the shining examples of our civilization, is an efficient grid of concrete, plastic, rubber and steel that denies us the ability to feel the earth. It denies us the ability to feel each other. Without our relationships - both with other people, and the natural environment - people are, in fact, nothing. Our cities are massive nodes of commerce allowing us to consume products from around the world. Often these things destroy people's lives or the natural environment in the way they are produced, transported, consumed, and disposed of. Established conventions compel people to ignore these consequences of relationships that sustain us; they compel us to be alienated from ourselves because a life without relationships is empty. Our senses are so stunted by following these conventions that people don't realize or don't care that we are nourished by suffering - that our actions are in fact suicidal, by jeopardizing the health of natural ecosystems, without which no person, let alone a civilization, may exist. We are preoccupied with our freedom, recognized as choice in our consumption habits. Arguably, this freedom amounts to little more than a greater range of relationships to ignore; it is simply greater freedom from ourselves. To know who we are, we must seek out the relationships that sustain us. Unfortunately, many of us will find ourselves living an inevitably empty, suicidal, and parasitic or tyrannical existence. We have two options to address this situation. We may wait until our suicidal tendencies end us. Or, we may foster and honour our interrelationships with other human beings and end our parasitic ways; our tyranny. We may honour our interrelationship with the natural environment, and overcome suicide. We may break the concrete conventions that compel apathy and ignorance and lionize suicide and tyranny. We may reinvent our cities, our societies - our lives - to honour our interrelationships. In doing so, we may cease to be empty. 

In doing so, we may know ourselves.

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Re: To Know Ourselves

By Loewen, Matt at Mar 28, 2009 10:59 AM

Eh, thank you both. As for a poem, well... sometimes when I try to turn things into poems they die! haha

 

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Treeleaffaery

Re: To Know Ourselves

By Costigan, Tom at Mar 26, 2009 01:22 AM

Nice one!

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589024

By Petersen, Robert at Mar 25, 2009 10:47 AM

Very poetic!  Nice little blurb to start the day.  Maybe it should be turned into a poem.  Robert

 

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