Why blog?
I’ve had a blog for several years, many more than the archives might suggest. Originally hand-rolled, then published with Movable Type, now WordPress. It has been a patchy and infrequent thing. I’ve lost content and deleted items that I felt offered too stark a characterisation or too fundamentalist political ideas.
There have never been any illusions about the process. It is entirely for me. Anything truly personal is offline, penned into books. What is written here is a collection of quotes, links, definitions, things that I have wanted to keep – like a scrapbook. And now I find myself asking my I bother keeping a blog at all.
If it is personal then perhaps it is better kept in a rolling document on my computer or, since it is mainly a collection of quotes and online ephemera poorly compiled, in any of the numerous digital offerings such as Delicious or Google Notebook, two applications that I already use.
And further to the question is why anyone would blog at all.
At a recent conference on social media the presenter distinguished between the “old” generation (above 25) and the new generation of online users by stating that the older users consider everything they do online to be private unless they make it public while the younger generation consider everything they do to be public unless they make it private. It was just the kind of pithy nugget of new media information I wanted to take back to the office.
But it offers no reason, save the ubiquity of Facebook and internet applications, why this should be the case. Blogs, Live Journals, etc are all becoming mainstream. Businesses no longer use them to present a hip, understanding front. They can offer a more personal means of communicating with the public. Which is bollocks; they are a company. The blog might be written by a person but when did we mistake meeting and speaking with somebody with reading a blog post?
I guess that can come down to some semiotic question, some communication studies theoretical argument about how we are ever able to communicate “personally”.
I read a lot of blogs. I have a vast, often interconnected, OPML list of sites and blogs served up through Google Reader. And here the process makes sense.
The inernet is huge and the amount of content, and by that I mean the stuff that I want to read, has become a gigantic rush of white noise. So I gather around various people who, for one reason, post or link, I consider worth watching and this digital collective whittles down the internet into something more manageable.
Some of these people are largely human editors in the way that Yahoo! and Looksmart used to be human editors – serving up links with brief descriptions. Others, like Jason Kottke or Merlin Mann, sometimes accompany links with the kind of insight or original idea that actually contributes to the whole endeavour.
Yet the “whole endeavour” still worries me.
Tonight I read an excellent review in the New Yorker. I really enjoy book reviews – it is one of my favourite sections in the Guardian Weekly. A good review can give an insight into the author, the subject, the historical perspective, even the basic philosophies and thinking behind the act of creating. And tonight, as fantastic James Wood’s analysis of Richard Yates and Revolutionary Road was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have spent the energy reading the actual book.
The New Yorker article was printed from the web, sourced via a blog, and it struck me how incredibly removed from actual things the internet is making me. It goes back the sheer mass of content online but is it better, for me, to have read one thousand blog posts that point to one hundred reviews of books and movies and restaurants than it is to have read a single book, seen a movie or had dinner? An utterly rhetorical and stupid question. I imagine that speaking briefly about a dozen books and films of which I am acquainted through reviews, or even just scores, makes for a wide-ranging, wine-swilling, onanistic dinner party conversation and ultimately a cipher of the individual.
Perhaps it is generous to suggest that blogging was ever anything more, but for the vast majority of people who (like me) aren’t contributing to the conversation, blogging and posting links seems to be a narcissistic urge for publication. It doesn’t even fall into the category of bad art – at least that has the potential to improve and become something greater. Posting links will always be a meta-process.
So where does that leave me? As the person writing the blog isn’t it better to have actually created something worthwhile, something wholly new than spent years compiling and cataloguing links and articles that other people wrote and that further people have already catalogued?
I suppose it comes down to finding a balance between reading and archiving the mass of information that ultimately points to books and films the majority of which go unread and unseen and then stepping away from that entire process and watching a film, working on a book (whether reading or writing) and either doing or creating something.
Which isn’t a long-winded declaration leading to closing my journal. It might mean that I have to think about ways to incorporate what I’m already doing with bookmarks and notebooks so that it keeps this whole process relevant. Or maybe it means that I write longer more thought out, original ideas, start some new fiction, perhaps, and publish something more considered, more real than links.
Oh, and the answer, is because it is easy. It is much easier to blog than it is to create something. And yet it is, it exists, published online and public as a testament to having done something even if blogging is nothing.