Fernando Gros

Writing

I’ve been blog­ging, on and off, since June 2001 and con­sist­ently on this site since Octo­ber 2004. The inspir­a­tion to get into blog­ging came from read­ing aca­dem­ics and reli­gious thinkers who were using the plat­form to spread new idea to read­ers in a faster and less medi­ated form than what print journ­als and magazines could allow.

Although a lot of blog­ging was (and to some extent con­tin­ues to be) of the dear-diary type, it was pretty clear, even ten years ago, that ser­i­ous and pro­fes­sional writers were using this plat­form in a revolu­tion­ary way. Everything that has come since those days, from Web2.0 to Web3.0, with social media, mobile and tablet com­put­ing thrown in rep­res­ents a rad­ical change to the pub­lish­ing land­scape for writers of all types.

My chosen form is the essay. With my back­ground in philo­sophy, reli­gious and cul­tural stud­ies, the essay became a nat­ural way to express my ideas. While essay writ­ing trans­fers well to the blog format, it is also telling that many of the magazines that remain as standard-bearers for the print-format, such The Atlantic, The Eco­nom­ist, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Monocle and Vanity Fair are bas­tions of the essay, in both short and long form.

Increas­ingly my writ­ing is tied to my other work in music and pho­to­graphy. Having recently star­ted a music pro­duc­tion com­pany, Sound­Wal­lah I’ve embarked on what will be a year long pro­ject to pro­duce a book (The Sound­Wal­lah Mani­festo) that will sum­mar­ise my exper­i­ences and per­spect­ives on global music. Also, I’ve begun to write stor­ies around some of my pho­to­graphic trips and am plan­ning to develop that more in the coming months (as well as writ­ing for the blog HKPhotographer.et).

Finally, in 2009, I suc­cess­fully com­pleted the National Novel Writ­ing Month with a draft novella set in Argen­tina during the 1970s.

All the thoughts on this blog are my own and I hold no formal polit­ical or reli­gious affil­i­ation (though I do identify with the Chris­tian tra­di­tion). All reviews, unless oth­er­wise clearly stated are for goods and ser­vices that were fully paid for by myself. Although blog­ging broadly sup­ports the work that I do and although I am will­ing to write pro­fes­sion­ally, I make no money from this blog and will not accept pay­ment (dir­ectly or in kind) for any favour­able review, pub­li­city or product payment.

“The point of the essay is to change things.” — Edward Tufte