I refuse to do anything unless I can bring something new to the table. Could there be anything "new" in the oversaturated world of blogs? Sure. But it'll probably take too much damn effort to think of it.
In the meantime, here are some thoughts about blogging:
If everyone has a blog (and I gotta admit, it was pretty easy to set this up), and writes a brief synopsis of what they do and think each day, and you could search for ideas, behaviors, etc by googling all blogs, then the internet (or rather tha corner of the internet known as the blogosphere) would begin to resemble the collective consciousness that the entire internet was intended to be (instead of the vast wasteland of advertisements and shitty defunct personal webpages it is).
When you look at this blog, or any other blog, or your blog, as an individual voice, it can seem pathetic. With so many voices, it seems as though there would never be any reason for anyone to listen to anyone else. But if you can search for ideas within them, then they don't seem so pathetic. Instead of the reader being all, "I wanna see what Joe Random did or thought or felt today" he or she'd be all, "I wonder what PEOPLE think of that new Handsome Boy Modeling School album?" or "what do PEOPLE think of me?".
I'm learning about all the imperfect ways people have tried to gauge public opinion. But if everyone would spill their guts in blogs, then every researcher could have instant access to a much more accurate picture of what public opinion truly is. And it won't just be marketers and social scientists who will use it. Anytime anyone is curious what other people think of 'x', they'll be able to find out.
People are stuck on the idea of reading things on the net "linearly". I think in the future, we'll read things "through" search engines. We'll have a question and we'll go thru the search engine to an EXCERPT of a site or blog, take what we need and bail. As the writer, its hard not to assume a linear reader. I guess writing on the web will evolve to be search friendly (as TV programming evolved after the remote control). I could put popular phrases in my blog to attract hits via google (e.g. clown porn). But then search engines will evolve to weed out things searchers don't want. Another arms race, I suppose.
Obviously, the blogosphere doesn't even come close to reflecting the population, demographically. But they're making it so durn easy to start one of these things. It just seems like the next logical step in this whole internet revolution. So blog, dammit. Write the most boring, bitchy, self-indulgent, unreadable blog you can write.
2 comments:
Excellent first post, dude. I almost feel like I know you... curious. I'm all for internet revolution, and it seems plausible because I once heard: "revolution, it sounds like a whisper." (Man, Bill Shakespeare was smart, or was that JFK?) Social change usually bubbles up from under the radar, then has to be co-opted by the man because so many people have already adopted the change. Funny to think that the voice of our collective consciousness will say, "You've got mail."
(insert modem connection noise here as an outro...)
Tru dat. But the internet is so freaking big, maybe it can't be entirely co-opted. Past examples: the man can co-opt radio or TV, be he can't co-opt print or phone conversations. Internet is more like telephone/print than like TV. I think it'll be cool for a long time, unless they keep jacking up the price of an internet connection, in which case, we're fcuked!
The sound of a modem will become funnier and funnier the more obsolete dial-ups get. And its pretty damn funny right now.
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