A Portrait of the Blogger as an Egomaniac

I recently got back from my two weeks in the sun and since my return I've baked several times in the daily London transport commuter cattle run and Victoria station has been closed during rush hour due to flash flooding... All in all I'm pleased to say I'm firmly back on British Summer Time.

The summer hols coincided with my annual ban from all things internet, this electronic exile actually does me a world of good since I spend almost all of my working life plugged in to a computer. After a while you can lose sight of who and what really matters; a minor software update often isn't that important in the scheme of things and despite the branding on the front of a piece of shiny kit it's (generally) not going to be radically different from another piece of shiny kit with a different name... Did I mention that this is a personal blog and not representative of my employer or its views?!

In my day to day business I sometimes come across people who would describe themselves as being very important on the internet. Some of them would even classify themselves as gurus of one kind or another, but “guru” is a small word with a larger meaning. To be perfectly honestly only once in my (fairly short) career have I worked with anyone who could be described as a web guru. It should be noted that he didn't attach that moniker to himself, that label is down to the New York Times... But hey since it's there! Now perhaps I could be accused of self-aggrandisement so to clarify I spent much of my brief time with Mr. Big making tea and small talk.

Almost all web gurus are self appointed and very few would meet the dictionary definition – it's like people that describe themselves as “a bit mad”, relatively few have had psychotic episodes and ss for web gurus it's hard to reach enlightenment in 140 characters or less. Bloggers have an ego, it's only natural you don't want to think you're wasting your time and if occasionally someone says they they've enjoyed a post or like your photography or home dungeon (or whatever) then that makes it worthwhile. However, dealing with “professional” bloggers on a business level can reveal that some of them are egomaniac tosspots!

While I was my holidays I found the perfect remedy for self importance... All my life I've held a healthy respect/fear of the sea, it's an alien environment where you are the intruder and it's full of things with teeth/spines/poison etc. However, I was persuaded that exploring the underwater world is fun, safe and natural, against my better judgement I was talked into scuba diving. There was no training, we were just taken a mile off shore and chucked in the sea, apparently this is perfectly legal as long as you don't go any deeper than five metres. I'm sure it was very safe, I was escorted by a professional, I could see the surface above me and that barracuda looked quite a long way away in retrospect, however I was of course petrified.

I had time to reflect on this as I waited for my friend to catch up as I hung from an underwater podium where I was supposed to feed the big-looking fish, however I'd previously flung the fish food away in a moment of sheer panic. I was left there with my thoughts staring out into the blue as my instructor briefly left me to my own devices - in my mind out of disgust at my abject cowardice. Rather than thinking about the sea's majesty I spent my time running through the ways I might die, I was surprised that drowning sat at the top of my list rather than being eaten alive by a rogue shark. I've now reached the conclusion that a diver must have come up with the phrase “big fish in a small pond” because I felt very insignificant, just one person in a world of billions whose life could be snuffed out in an instant (or at least in a nightmarish drawn out drowning.)

You'd be right to ask “so what does this have to do with home entertainment...?” Well after contemplating my own cosmic insignificance I began to recognise the psychological appeal offered by the digital world: I may not be a Booker prize winning novelist but I can still (hopefully) entertain a few friends and peers with the musings/rants on this blog, I don't have the wit of Stephen Fry but I might occasionally offer up the occasional amusing tidbit to at least draws an LOL from all my new BFFEs on Twitter. I'm certainly not going to compete at Wimbledon but the Wii offers as close an experience as I'm going to get, I've never been a samba-fixated cartoon monkey... I could go on.

Sadly there have been a few instances of disturbed individuals who have been unable to fully separate their digital world from the real one, perhaps these isolated incidents will increase as technology improves and digital simulacra become ever more “real”? For the time being video games are arguably a safe outlet for our fantasies of world domination, social networks offer a semblance of community in an increasingly isolated and sedentary Western world. Therefore the positive aspects of digital entertainment largely outweigh the negatives and as for me I'm a blogger which makes me one of the most important people in the world... Now where did I put that spacesuit?