Janet is: thinking about her audience.

It’s the social epidemic you haven’t heard about: reckless proliferation and abandonment of blogs. Unlike the other bad ideas you’ve had, the blog is a digital capsule incapable of being tied to concrete sleepers and pitched off a bridge. An estimated 95 percent of blogs are abandoned in the first 120 days of operation, leaving host networks to clean up the littered blogosphere, and many more to wonder where monsoon season went, otherwise parched of thoughts.

Why do we start these blogs, why do we stop them, and who reads the little bastards anyway?

There are what I term ideologue blogs, concept blogs, and journaling blogs. The first is designed consciously as a broadcast of dogma, political bent or conspiracy theory – notoriously full of incorrect information and invective, we shall write them off as advertising for the loony club of the month.

Concept blogs, much like a concept album, have a unifying feature or theme – like, say, love of pizza – which grafts content together in a niche blog. Really common themes – parenting, for example – make for consistently dull blog material, though decent traffic. On the other hand, super obscure material could find you that underground audience (She-Ra revival?) or leave you in a land of esoteric solitude (no one wants to hear your theories linking Chris De Burgh and Dante’s Inferno).

Journaling blogs are what fascinate me. While the idea of keeping a diary with an eye to public dissemination isn’t new (Kerouac’s highly self-conscious diaries are a good example of material geared toward eventual fame), the ability to publish it instantaneously is. Essentially we have removed the barriers of time, discerning publishing gateways, and the requirement that you be someone interesting to begin with. We are each our own aspiring celebrity in the world of Facebook, Twitter and Blogger, branding our movements to and from the mall, changing in and out of thrift store clothes, and associating ourselves with other idols in the sphere – our friends, who become signifiers of a sort. The success of our blogs depends largely on our ability to “network” online, and to simplify our personas for consumption by the masses.

What Michel Foucault termed “author functions” have been further tainted in the hopes of book deals, supplemental income, and fame, all courtesy of blog land. The trick to flourishing in live media (Twitter, Facebook, Vlogs) is to create jarring hybrid lexicons (vlog!) for catchiness, and iron out your persona; essentially you are a character thinking out loud, only you’re far less compelling than Holden Caulfield, whom your writing likely kills. To illustrate my point, I’ve inserted a blonde smiley head-shot of me winking at you top left corner, like I’m speaking my “highly original” drivel to you right as you read it – it’s inane, isn’t it? Friend me!

Foucault cited ownership, responsibility/liability, status and implied tone as primary author functions, which is to say there are reasons we write our name on things that we write, which wasn’t always the case.

With the rise and rise of the op-ed and televised commentary on anything from Sasha and Malia’s cafeteria food to urban panthers, there are more people than ever broadcasting argument – more names on opinion pieces. The question becomes who to listen to – for which we have to thank the headshots and first-person bios. As asserted by Farhad Manjoo, we read arguments we already agree with; we listen to those who affirm our beliefs. Or we don’t read at all.

As attested by the ever growing slush piles at publishing houses, more people than ever think they can write, and yet readership of published books has stalled outside of cookbooks, Twilight and Harry Potter. This has a lot to do with the popularity of the memoir and the individualistic culture that promotes personal narratives. How many times after sharing a story have you been told “oh, you should make that into a book.” Or thought it?

I’ve tried to blog. There are several tombstones located around wordpress and blogspot I could own up to (but won’t). I’ve created perfect records of my thoughts, a stream-of-consciousness in html for the world to enjoy, supplemented by all things Janet, geared subtly toward the perceived audience. No one read them. As Seinfeld noted, what he was really looking for all the time was himself … until he got bored of himself. SatireWire genius Andrew Marlatt cited “creative differences” in abandoning his solo dot com. Even I didn’t want to read my posts.

So what is the harm in all this self-marketing? Our higher intelligence is training itself to remain switched to “broadcast” for the waking hours – it’s like a Strasbergian nightmare, where you never stop acting, but begin to believe the performance is life. LOL stuff. I know many will argue that the internet has democratized literature, and wrenched it away from the stronghold of the English canon. And it’s true, very few dead white males blog, but then very few mommydiaries bloggers have quite the same affinity for meter that Wordsworth had. By removing the filter, are we obscuring the writers who deserve the attention? Certainly the notion of “quality,” which we academy-types frequently reach consensus on, and yet are largely unable to articulate, seems fatally challenged by the “everyone’s voice has value” crowding of dialectic in the blogosphere.

Are we evolving into the most self-interested population in history? Nineties-style neuroticism is out, and Naughties internet-affirmation is in, along with Mulligrub glamour portraits that obscure all but your nostrils, hair and eyes. Self-idolatry was never so becoming.

Does it matter what a writer looks like? The more information we have on the author, the less neutrality the text retains, which of course is the point today. Should publishing aim to be egalitarian? Populist it has always been.

It doesn’t matter terribly what I say, for the internet has spoken. And who am I? Just another failed blogger.

Header photo by D Sharon Pruitt and licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 and is filed under Commentary, FrontPage, VOL2009.02. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.