Blog On

I’ve always had a love hate relationship with blogging. It’s hard to understand how extremely personalized, un-fact checked, and unedited work has become such an online influence. Its appeal becomes increasingly obvious as soon as you start participating in one. Admittedly, I’m a hypocrite. I’ll come clean and say as much as I like reading and visiting blogs-I’m sure they constitute ninety percent of the webpages I visit- I have never had any interest whatsoever in writing blogs or commenting on them. But as soon as I started, I could instantly see the appeal. I notice when that when I blog, I am constantly thinking of the millions of potential readers, ambiguously surfing the web. Maybe a few of them will stumble upon my blog, and maybe some of them will even read it. Blogging is like meeting a group of people for the first time, albeit without ever knowing who they are or what they think. You want your blog to be inviting, amiable, funny, you want your blog to appeal to everyone, but mostly you just want it to be liked, and returned to again and again.

Blogging is very much like any kind of writing but its peculiarities as a form sometimes make it hard to get used to. Seeing my words on a page accessible by any of the millions with Internet access, made me first feel like a bit of an exhibitionist. It takes a while to get use to the fact that your words are out there exposed for all the world to see. In this way blogging is just a reminder that anybody serious about writing, or their own writing should be prepared for the fact that others will be able to read, and perhaps disagree with either their ideas or style. I’ve also come to realize that blogging is much less an exercise in stream of consciousness dissemination than I had thought. It requires preparation and organization of your thoughts and arguments.

Blogging can be cathartic, exciting, and maddening all at the same time. Many of my strengths and weaknesses with writing in other forms are similarly visible in the blog. It has been hard for me to find my own ‘voice’ while blogging. It is hard to be conscious of those uniquely characteristic parts of your personality that imbue your blog and create an imagined individual to your readers. It’s also makes one realize just how difficult writing as a form can be. It’s difficult to be satirical in a short paragraph that is probably going to be largely glossed over without the sensory ability to show visible facial expression or audible tone. This is where blogging has to be separated from other forms of writing. I find myself revising my blogs to be concise and digestible, and to communicate my underlying mood more patently, as again, it is hard to build tension or irony in several abridged sentences and paragraphs. It’s also hard to be timely, and by extension prescient, which is what I think all blogs aspire to be. I often find myself wanting to indulge my own thoughts about things that are not necessarily bound to the present.

The lens of timeliness is how I’ve now come to understand TV and the experience of watching it. I’ve come to realize that if something is on TV it must be related to current trends in some way or another. I even noticed this on pay-tv movie channels like Showtime and starz. After Dennis Hopper died you could watch Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, and so one, decisions made maybe even subconsciously by some programming director. I’ve also come to see how communal TV can be. Events can be broadcast and shared experientially by billions of people. The world cup is perhaps the most recent and glaring example of how the world embraces television as a source of not just entertainment but also community and national pride. Television is thus much too multi-faceted in terms of the meaning it communicates and the goods, both tangible and ineffably, that it provides its audience. Something this meaningful and entrenched in the human mind won’t be going away if there are still people around to watch it.