Herding cats...

I'm an enthusiast for the Scottish Roundup's motivations, its purpose and its achievements in creating or at least reinforcing the "imagined community" of Scottish blogging commentary. Certainly, our shared political orientations towards Holyrood contrive to combine us institutionally, thematically, but I think it is no bad thing to have a loose focus of our collective endeavour, a secondary figuration if you like, a sort of echo-room. While it is undoubtedly easy enough to squint inwards, and regard Scotch blogging as an incestuous crew, this attitude seems to me to be unnecessarily sour. 

I started blogging in January 2009 (which seems insane to consider now) but the roundup always struck me as a way of making connections, alerting people to one's existence and generally expanding Scots blogging frontiers. It serves a primarily virtuous function. The internet is curious in this respect. While there may be an apparent, almost untold liberty - people only find us by our connections, following traces we leave. It seems to me a field of information, dominated by a sort of intentionality and deliberation. While turning a page in a newspaper is an idle, thoughtless act, generally one only stumbles upon new information on the internet by a broad, preliminary search, or a not-so-randomly generated link, a Twitter whim communicated by an existing but unrelated connection. There are undoubtedly lessons in this for our wider apprehension of society, our politics, our community - and how notions, conceptions, arguments and so forth diffuse and spread across that interlaced network of care and attention. To whit, those interested could do much worse than reading some of the social theory of the anglophone sociological Frenchman, Bruno Latour.

Leaving such matters aside for the moment, this week I've step into the breach (which needless to say, in military terms is generally a terrifically bad idea) and have composed this last-minute roundup of the Scottish blogosphere's creative endeavour over the last seven days, Summer's Lease Hath All Too Short a Date...