To Blog or Not to Blog: That is the revolution
It was the first time that, when sitting at a bar in Boston, the fellow I’d been speaking with leaned over and asked me for my blog address that I realized something had changed. The portal into my life was no longer my phone number, but my blog address. When did this happen?
These days, it has been over ten years since my first blog which was rudimentary at best, a collage of half learned HTML code and a graphic or two which I’d stolen from a website with pretty pictures that I insisted defined some inner part of me, just as my confessional journaling did. I found the confessional form of blogging to be inspirational and freeing. I was able to become a person that wrote eloquently and identified herself with archived forms of art. Ah, to be young again and defined by my current poet obsession and favorite rock band, both of which I could write epic journal entries about and believe absolutely that I was writing something important.
Maybe I was writing something important. Rebecca Blood certainly seems to think so. The act of taking up arms and creating free self-expression is no less than romantic and revolutionary.When I began blogging, the term blogging hadn’t even been coined yet. It didn’t manifest until 1997, several years after my first online journaling experience. In the beginning it was a radical, romantic revolution. It was new media at its best- a cooperative, interactive community. That’s before the great explosion, when we all migrated from our homes onto the internet, abandoning the pursuit of real-life identities in favor of the multi-media doppleganger. The number of blogs range into the millions, from communities like LiveJournal to easy to use and more professional formats like Blogger. From MySpace to Google, everyone with a brand name has a blog format they want to explore and free advertising space they want to gobble up.
Blogging had evolved more than once, devouring primarily text based journaling and expanding to art, comics, audio and video as new ways of expressing an old habit. We’re insatiable in our quest for a better way to express ourselves to the biggest audience possible. We’ve flourished in numbers. But as a whole, we’re barely better than navel-gazers.
We don’t journal for ourselves, we journal for an audience. We want perfect strangers to care about what we had for breakfast or that the snow outside really made our morning miserable. I’ve watched as a crack has formed in our exploration of self-expression. In response to Blood’s assertion that we “urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human” (Bucy, 2005, p. 132), I hate to disagree but blogging is not going to save us from corrosive numbness brought on by the advertisers and marketers.
The future research is going center heavily on not just identity creation, but the social reasons why people have abandoned real-life identity creation for an online medium. Social theorists are going to join teams with speech act theorists and narrative theorists to tease out the difference between someone’s real-life persona and their embellished (or diminished) online selves and look for a reason for the fractures between the two. Research will also endeavor to determine if there is a pattern to identity trait creation online. If certain identity traits created online that are not found in the real-life identity of the creator appear to be common and widespread, new research will be spawned to determine why certain traits are so desirable that people will manifest them in an online identity. Social and cultural theorists are going to be watching our behavior for many years to come.
There’s a troubling aspect to the mass quantities of bloggers, and that is that like most forms of art, few people will rise to the top and be noticed as more than a daily recorder of trivial events. Few blogs will be singled out as a “must read” and those that do will do so not because the person writing is particularly interesting or great, but because they have something to sell, some insight into a market or interest that many people want in on but themselves don’t want to do the leg work. This affect is true for most mediums that require a participant to rise above the rest- from literature to philosophy to poems to music. To be popular and widely read, you have to have a gimmick to draw them in and keep them coming back for more. That’s not the world of self-expression-will-heal-all-our-social-hurts that Blood is hoping for. This isn’t the movie “Hackers” or “Pump Up the Volume” where the people, tired of being used and abused by the system, the marketing machine, rise up and invalidate the The Man.
Bloggers are part of the system. They are in fact, a powerful viral marketing machine themselves that gets the word out on new subjects and promotes hyper-linking discussion. They do the work of advertisers in the guise of having strong opinions, eager dreams and a clever way with words. The research money is going to go into studies of how communities, interaction and online identity can be used to work more efficiently and cost effectively in viral marketing campaigns. At the risk of sounding like a skeptical, paranoid blogger, the research is not going to be in how we can make ourselves more human and part of a romantic revolution, but how we can be used commercially.
Until of course, the next big new media comes around that we can throw ourselves into with bright ideas of romantic, poetic self-expression and interactive revolution, becoming the cogs in a new machine. Maybe we ought to be studying why we are so interested, as a culture, in recreating ourselves outside of the real world, why we as a culture are looking for a self-expressive revolution, why we are so unhappy to be ourselves without the canvas of technology. Why do we think we can make a better world for ourselves in a new medium?
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