Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.

First Taste for Free

A couple of weeks ago, Nine Inch Nails "released" an album online for free, prompting me to consider the viability of such an economic model.

First off, we need to note that NIN is (are?) a well established artist. People know their music, like their music, and would spend time listening to their music. And that's the key - consumers would spend time listening to the album. Forget money. Money spent for any particular text does not matter so much in the new media economy. Attention and time matter. Once you build up interest, you can charge for a subsequent album, a t-shirt, a concert, etc.

In today's media economy, if an artist can establish a fan base, they don't have to charge them for every album or every concert. As long as they can maintain some profit margin, as opposed to the huge profit margin they enjoyed before, the artist can make a living. Before, labels and studios had to charge consumers way more than a CD or a movie cost to produce b/c they had to pay for the duds that they churned out (Pareto's principle). They couldn't know which one of their products would be duds and which would be smashes. They also had to cover the costs of developing new talent (equivalent to R&D costs). But I don't think that distributors need to pay for that anymore. Artists can record and film stuff on the cheap, put it out there for free, see if its popular, cultivate interest in the unique output of that artist, and then charge $ for the subsequent output of that artist. You could also whore yourself out to advertisers and make $ off of modestly popular work, but I think the purest model for art/entertainment sales should be: give them a taste for free, then charge them for more once they're hooked (the drug-dealer economic model). Ads just add clutter, and I'm not sure they even work well enough to justify their existence.

Really, the only thing that agents, studios, and labels are useful for is visibility. They can artificially boost the visibility of an artist's output through promotion. But bloggers (gatekeepers, tastemakers) and the transparency of popularity on the web counteracts such promotional efforts. Right now, a small percentage of consumers make their decisions as to what to spend their time listening to or watching based on bloggers or online popularity tracking (that may in fact be affected by promotion). That's right now. But what if the people who paid attention to bloggers and popularity trackers were jsut early adopters? What if, in the coming years, most people took their cues from these sources? Could it render advertising, promotion, labels, studios, and agents all obsolete? I think that it could.

Whenever I raise the possibility that promotion may be futile in the new media economy, I hear a voice saying that promotion is more insidious than I imagine it to be, that its influence is hard to track but still exists. This voice says that anyone questioning the viability of promotion and advertising is hopelessly naive. This strikes as possibly true, but doesn't seem like a strong argument; more like something said by those with a vested interest in defending the business model of advertising and promotion. Its going to get very hard to trace whether an artist or a work become popular due to promotion or organic word-of-mouth popularity based on the merit of the work. However, the internet makes these paths visible, so maybe we could begin to see how effective promotion is when compared to the aggregated tastes of millions of users. If you want to defend the role of promotion and advertisement in the art industry, fine, but back your argument up with some hard data. If you're really about making money, then do it efficiently. Spend your money figuring out what makes a work good or popular and then make it. Don't promote shit that you're uncertain about. To quote Martin Sheen in Wall Street: "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Giving some of your work away for free is, in a sense, the ultimate promotion. Usually, ads and previews for movies are distorted pieces of a larger whole that are designed to make the whole more appealing than it actually is. But if you give away a whole album, a whole season, a whole movie for free, then there's nothing distorted about that.

And yet, it would seem unfair if, say, the creators of Lost gave away most of the narrative for "free" on TV and then concluded it with a movie that we have to pay to see. I see this with online video: its very difficult to tell whether an individual video is functioning as a satisfying media product in and of itself, a piece of a larger work that you could either have to pay for or tolerate ads with (in which case it is just an "ad" for the larger work), or both.

Maybe promoters are necessary, or inevitable. But I certainly don't think that art couldn't be sold w/o them. Artists are engaging in large scale economic experiments, and the results suggest that we should start reconsidering the role of promoters in the art business.