How to Write a Blog That Can Laugh at Itself [Part 2]

In Part 1, I drew attention to what I described as the self-referentialism of the blogiverse, where such a noticeable percentage of blogging is about blogging, rather than blogging about something. I said the medium may be susceptible to such navel-gazing but it IS possible to use it to actually SAY something.

It is sometimes said that all writing is autobiography, no matter how seemingly remote the subject matter is from oneself. Perhaps, similarly, all blogging is blogobiographical. Whether one writes about blogging tips or pirate ships the point is, more often than not, to attract attention, interest, and traffic to the blog itself.

The blog is, in other words, a rather unique kind of text because more than most it brazenly abandons the fundamental desire that texts are thought to harbour within them, namely, the desire to mean something, to point beyond themselves to an object, a truth, an idea. Blogs rarely care about much else than providing the means to be returned to.

But, to say something in a blog, I mean to really say something, one can’t ignore the parameters of the format.

It’s the same way with art. If art wants to have a message and makes it obvious that it has a ‘message’, we cringe. But if art embraces itself as art it is able to really do things; it can move us, challenge us, make us examine ourselves, evoke feelings.

If you try to act as if your blog isn’t a blog, it becomes unreadable and laborious. So there is a balance to be struck between an awareness of the shallow nature of the genre and the desire to treat it like something it isn’t by beating protracted content over the reader’s head.

The best blogs know what they are and can be playful with themselves in a way that enhances their content.

If you can find ways to let your blog make a serious point and be a little playful with its own status as a blog, then you will be providing your readers with something entertaining as well as valuable.

It’s not an altogether new concept, i.e., to use self-reference as a way to make a point. Even as far back as the seventeenth century Diego Velasquez painted a picture of himself painting a picture (Las Meninas, above). The effect was remarkable. Rather than the standard portrait of the King and Queen of Spain, made in the style of classical realism, Velasquez chose to embrace the fact that a painting is never more than a re-presentation of a scene, and he painted something that was conscious of this, including himself, the painter.

Velasquez was in other words the first blogger, effectively, inasmuch as he made a painting of a painting (in the same way that we write blogs about writing blogs). But, in Velasquez’s case the self-reference achieves something more. It achieves something pleasing, something that conveys significant content, something that engages the viewer. This is what every blogger hopes to achieve as well.

In the third installment of this article I will conclude by discussing how we can apply the lessons of Velasquez to our blogs to produce quality content, without being too dense or high brow, which will generate interest and convey depth in our writing.

Stumble It!

~ by Shane Waggoner on December 11, 2008.