Main | The “Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008” »
February 11, 2008
Askin’s back, back again, Askin’s back, tell a friend …
“Guess who's back
Back again
Jonny’s back
Tell a friend
Guess who's back,
guess who's back,
guess who's back,
guess who's back
guess who's back,
guess who's back,
guess who's back ...”
♪♫
(Not enough bars to violate Eminem’s copyright)
After a half year hiatus from the world of VON (getting my feet wet in academia), I’m back.
Up until now, I have not blogged (at least not under my own name – god forbid I should be nailed down with an immutable point of view). Frankly, I’ve never really wanted to be quite so exposed (maybe it’s a product of having been raised by civil libertarian privacy freaks). Maybe that’s why, even though I advocate for the online social networks, I am reluctant to fully relinquish my identity and submit myself to them – too much exposure, too much memorialized for posterity, too much that could be thrown back at me down the line. I don’t think I would have made a very good 15-year-old MySpace kid. My first blogged contradiction – I want fame/recognition/immortality, but I want to preserve my privacy, my mystery. Conflicting desires that might not be able to exist in harmony within my head.
So, although I pretend that “Fame or Infamy” has been my mantra, I have typically been more content serving as the man-behind-the-man. And candidly, I’ve never really wanted to be committed to my own position. Maybe the hired gun lawyer in me? Or maybe I’d prefer to think that, like the Internet, viewpoints are allowed to be ever-evolving without someone trying to point to your logical contradictions over time. Like I often say, “I don’t trust a guy who contradicts himself.” … Like I often say, “I don’t trust a guy who doesn’t contradict himself.” (My second blogged contradiction, which absurdly enough, is about contradiction itself. Will this immediate self-contradiction become a trend? I hope not … and I hope so.)
Or, if not about my privacy or the courage of my convictions, maybe my reluctance to blog has been based on the debilitating belief that anything that can be said with words alone is probably not worth saying. While every lie only requires about 200 backup lies, every opinion requires about 58 trillion supporting qualifying statements, and posting text on the Internet is just too cheap and easy that I would feel compelled to type ad nauseum to capture every nuance, …at which point blogging ceases to be easy.
Or, maybe, I’ve always doubted the intelligence or originality of my views. Or maybe I thought it was simply too vain to think that others might gave a damn. Whatever the case, like the Scarecrow in the “Wizard of Oz”, I’ve been given a credential that bestows on me, at least, the confidence to think that I might have something worthwhile to add to the conversation. I am now a bona fide law professor, teaching telecom, Internet and new media law at Brooklyn Law School, in the heart of the greatest city in the known universe -- Brooklyn.
So, swallowing my concern that whatever you post to the Internet has a tendency to stay on the Internet forever, I am initiating this blog with my musings on the state of telecom, new media, the Internet, and whatever else strikes me. At least I can control, to some extent, the removal of text that I later come to regret or disavow. Not so when others post your stuff. Has anyone ever tried to remove an unflattering picture (usually a shot from below with a mobile phone)?
Yeats apparently once wrote in his poem “The Second Coming” something to the effect that “the best lack all conviction…" (I understand that with this Internet thing it’s possible to verify the precise quote). I'm honored to count myself among the ranks Yeats’ “best” (maybe I'll return the favor some day and read one of his poems). In any event, I am of the loose and mutable “conviction” that any conviction is pretty much as likely to be true as its inverse or some other tangential notion. So, by way of final, preliminary excuses, I state for the record that I am committed to nothing expressed herein. This blog and the blogs to follow may, in fact, be inaccurate or partially inaccurate or reflect just a portion of mutable, evolving thoughts. I, therefore, reserve the right to wake up tomorrow or a year from now and retract or deny all or any part hereof.
Anyway, I was told (by the blogger pioneers) that blogs should be short and frequent. This blog has gone way past its respectable limit. So, more later. …
Tags: Jonathan Askin, Internet Communications, New Media
Posted by jonathan.askin at February 11, 2008 09:22 AM
Comments
Have to say...I LOVE the name of your blog, Jonny. Will keep reading...
Posted by: K² at February 12, 2008 08:27 AM