No not a new technological advancement, I'm talking about MY future, and not just blogging but the world wide web.
My thoughts are a little vague at the moment, but here goes. Recently I've been foolishly caught up arguing the toss about Revenge of the Sith, don't roll your eyeballs, I know it's a lame thing to do, that's part of the problem. You see I though Sith was terrible but other than that I just didn't care, it was just a film and that was that. But the forum, the only forum I'm part of because it grew up from out of a small press comic scene I was once part of, had someone posting about how amazing Sith was. Now it's a polite forum so I try an maintain a calm well balanced online persona, therefore my repsonse to these posts was to express my dislike of Sith and to say why. it really should have been an end to it except for one thing, I'm an idiot. How on earth can you rationally talk about how bad a Star Wars film is with a Star Wars fan! As the thread continued it became increasingly obvious that the fan was unhappy with my comments, me and my manner of expressing them. As for me I became frustrated at his ignoring my points his 'wacky persona'. All of this threatening at any time to tear through the thin veneer of 'polite debate'. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I don't know....
Then this morning I read a post on peteashton.com about petes response to a 'blogebrity' (it's a nightmarish concept given my dislike for celebs - more of that later) list that he's not on. Pete also mentions someones post on their blog about once being 'queen of blogging' until they backed away and became most forgotten. Bloggers becoming celebrities?! It's a horrible thought, but now I realise it's what most of us want, we want to be heard, we want people to understand us, agree with us, maybe we even want to provoke. Except, I don't think I do want that. I think no one needs a blog to be some one, I think idon't like being misinterpreted on forums as I express mild opinions about something pretty uninteresting, I don't think I want the pressure of trying to write posts that are interesting and usually failing. People having to back off from the harsh lights of blogebrity because the readers are getting weird, that seems wrong.
I don't know what I'm getting at, I still like the idea of blogging but I'm unsure where I fit into it and how I want to do it, but as I've posted maybe half a dozen times in the last couple of months and never linked my blog anywhere in an atempt to get a wider audience I wonder if I'm really going carry on.
3 comments:
it's weird. do we write to share with those we know, or to get an 'audience'. i think the thing i've decided is that although the blogebrities like to see themselves as the new columnists and pursue the latter interest their time is much more transient than they'd like to think, and people who write in newspapers/magazines have editors and quality control and a reason for being hired. ergo newspapers win for guaranteed readability, blogs are good for a dip but i don't really buy the idea of closely following anything but your friends' blogs for this reason. not that blogging's not great and interesting, perhaps some people just need to keep it in perspective.
i bet you wouldn't have had the same problems if you'd had similar comments in the paper rather than on a message board.
Editor's really do play an important role in any creative process.
Should probably point out that the 'problems' on the message board were as much of my own making as the guy I 'tussled' with, just thought I should make that clearer incase it sounded like I was having a go at him. It's more about the strange behaviour the internet seems to breed in all of us.
i've just read that article and, probably like most of us, he seems a bit conflicted. on the one hand he says "A good blogger is someone who points you to things you hadn't considered before, not just links but ideas, notions and experiences." And "If I can give one or five or ten or fifty or a hundred people something interesting to read or some neat link to follow then my job is done." But he also complains, albeit flippantly, that he's been plugging away for "five fucking years" and still not getting recognition.
i like the first couple of points, but even the fact that he calls it his 'job' must reveal something about the expectation he puts into this thing.
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