Shortwave ListeningForeign Affairs – Why do I blog?
I blog because I’m trying to add relevance to a hobby that deserves attention: shortwave listening (yes, SWLing has a Wikipedia article of its own, just like trainspotting).
Blogging looks like a good compromise between offline publications (which take rather long to prepare, to print and to distribute) and keep-it-short social media like Bluesky (or, in the past, Twitter).
Blogging is (practically) realtime. The irony is that "realtime" is something that is often missing in shortwave broadcasting. With a few exceptions, broadcasters – big or small, from huge relay networks and on the air several hours a day, to just on air an hour per week or month – now have prerecorded programs transmitted. The BBC World Service is an exception to this rule (schedule, item 4), and so is Radio New Zealand (schedule). All India Radio might be an exception, too, but I’m not sure how much, if anything, of their programs on shortwave is "live".
Just as your blogs, reactions to them are realtime, too. And just as for your posts, comments may be short or long. It’s for the writer to decide, and that’s good. The more matters of interest a post or comment contains for the reader, the longer they may be, and the reader will keep reading anyway.
Blogs usually center around one topic, or around a limited number of related topics. There are blogs that are sort of online diaries, and there are those that focus on activities or fields of study.
That’s another perk of blogging. Once you blog yourself, you might also read and comment on other blogs, or ask questions there. Reading and having discussions on other peoples’ blogs broadens your horizon, not necessarily only about the topic you blog about yourself. One blog with topics rather different from shortwave listening is Grammaticus: It is about language, mostly the English language, from the perspective of a blogger who learned English as a second language. That’s not so different from my own experience with learning English – it isn’t my first language either, and as an "ESL learner" (English-as-a-second-language learner), your perspective on the language is probably always different from a native speaker’s. There’s some movie nostalgia in Grammaticus’s blog, too, and I’ve learned about TV miniseries I hadn’t watched before. Occasionally, I’m also reminded of TV movies I used to watch as a child.
And there is The Historical Vagabond, covering travels in America, in Europe, and in time. As far as Europe is concerned, it is a foreigner’s perspective, just as my perspective on English is a foreigner’s.
Maybe this is what makes blogging, and reading blogs, worthwile. Blogs bring the world together. OK, that’s a bit huge. But they give me a glimpse on different ways to look at life, in and from different places. And different from Bluesky & Company, bloggers don’t have to act as if we were all swimming in the same juice, because blogging gives us space to explain things at any length we see fit.
Blogs give us an idea of how much of the world is still foreign. And "foreignness" is good thing. When people believe that they’ve been everywhere and have learned everything, curiosity dies.
#dailyprompt #dailyprompt2047 #DXing #foreignRadio #internet
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