How to Write a Blog about How to Write a Blog About… [Part 1]
The self-referentialism of the interweb is by now well-known. But blogophiles have turned it into one hell of a rabbit hole.
In the ‘nineties, hip hop underwent something similar. For a few years the best way to make a hit song was to write a song about how your song was going to be a hit. And they did. Become hits.
Bloggers chase after hits too. They try to attract hits on their sites by stuffing them with tags and titles that people are searching: how to make money writing blogs, how to write a blog, how to make money writing blogs about how to make money…writing blogs.
(Chances are, you stumbled across my article by looking for exactly that, a blog about blogging. Don’t be disappointed, this is much, much better! )
Just tell me: is it the red pill or the blue pill that gets me out of here? Is the heavy presence of such navel-gazing in the blogosphere a symptom of the medium or of a diminished experience on our parts? Have we nothing more to say than the fact that we would like to have something to say?
Immanuel Kant once said that concepts without intuition are blind. Translation: thoughts about nothing are not really thoughts at all.
I know what both groups of cynics are thinking. The first group is chuckling to themselves that I am, at this very moment, using the medium that I am satirizing. I’ve produced tags and a popularly searched title to attract attention to my article only to talk about the fact that we don’t seem to have much to talk about here on the internet. What could be more navel-gazing than that?
The second group is smug because they’re thinking to themselves that what I’m overlooking is the extent to which the increasingly virtualized world we now live in is thoroughly self-referential. This is the hallmark of what in the ‘eighties began to be called postmodernism and by now is just mundane business.
Yes I know, the internet, which permeates our experience, is wildly self-referential, an infinite network of endlessly flickering signifiers. And yes, I know, I would be kidding myself to pretend not to be implicated in it.
But still, I want to say something. And so do you. So how can you use this medium, with all of its limitations and its proclivities towards infobits and circularity to actually SAY something?
I’ll tell you how.
Check back again for Part 2.
Stumble It!
Admitting that I’ve yet to read Part 2, let me just “say” that there may be a third option between “saying something” (which sounds vaguely like a symptom of pragmatism and even mild anti-intellectualism, ironic as that may seem, though I know all too well it isn’t) and “saying nothing” so as to be seen but not heard. Granted, what I’m about to propose still, I suppose, leans more toward the latter than the former. Nevertheless, what of community? On one hand, this may equate to nothing more than personal identities going, or being carved out or crafted, publicly (i.e., for the sole purpose of their own personal benefit). But in and around certain topics, it may represent a sort of “critical mass” whereby more voices generate more voices until something becomes sufficiently “in the air” to effect change (whether for better or worse).