Why I have not blogged in a dog’s age. There are too many reasons to post all at once, so here are the best:
1. My computer died. It served me faithfully for many years and then started behaving like a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s. When I was in the shop with it, I saw a t refurbished G5 tower they were unloading for dirt cheap, so I bought it. I got what I paid for. A couple weeks after I brought it home, it started behaving like a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s. So I said I’d buy something brand new like an iMac quad core. They said they’d credit me the price of the defunct G5 and we shook on it. So I’ve been waiting more than a month now for Apple to ship the new iMacs. Yawn. I suppose I could post things using my old powerbook, but after a while, using a laptop feels a lot like living out of a suitcase. (My apologies to laptop users, but I’m spoiled rotten.)
2. Blogging is a distraction. Some writers decry blogging (and the internet in general) as a distraction lethal to their craft. Others, like Cory Doctorow, argue that it enriches their writing. I think there are no rules; it depends on the personal style of a given writer. The unexpected absence of a computer has taught me that I have trouble balancing the reading/writing time I spend online with the reading/writing time I spend offline. I get sucked into the online world with its urgent up-to-the-minuteness, its argumentative forums, its polarizing ethos. But in the last six weeks, without that noise, I’ve almost completed the left half of a novel. I know that sounds silly (about the left half), but it’s true. (I’m writing two companion novels that are presented in tandem on the left half and the right half of the page.) Yes! I’ve written almost an entire novel in six weeks. I’ve meant to write this work for ages, but my good intentions have gone ignored because I’d rather nip into the internet candy store (or is it an opium den?).
3. Blogging wrecks good writing. Blogging is most effective (i.e. attracts the most hits) when it is “strong” blogging. Strong blogging is blogging that takes a clearly defined point of view, that expresses an opinion, that positions itself on the political spectrum. And it’s even stronger if it works at someone else’s expense. Because of that, it tends to be the worst kind of prose – a prose without nuance. Some people argue that an absence of nuance is neither here nor there. After all, we can’t expect all blogging to stand on a par with op-ed pieces in the New Yorker. Most of it is simply entertainment. There’s a lot of that about, a kind of straw man approach to writing. You hunt down your mark, somebody you disagree with – in the blogosphere, that is a one-minute task – then you respond to the mark as if you were engaging him in real debate and cared about his point of view, or at least cared about the subject matter of the debate. The object is to say clever things at the expense of your mark. Conservative cultural commentators are particularly adept at this kind of straw man strategy for content creation. e.g. Michele Malkin. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is a kind of entertainment, but in the same way that cock-fighting is entertainment – it requires you to be a particular kind of person. Maybe a better description is masturbation. I guess I’m not blogging so much these days because my arm is tired.
4. There’s more important stuff to write. I already mentioned that I’m almost finished the left half of a novel. For some time now, I’ve been nurturing the modestly zen conviction that my writing will never be any good until I have nothing to say. The problem with blogging is that, by its nature, it requires me to have something to say. I don’t want to have things to say. I want write well.
5. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. When bloggers aren’t masturbating, they’re masturbating others. This is nothing new in the world of news media. For decades, news agencies like Associated Press and Reuters have been in the business of generating original content which they syndicate to hundreds of media outlets. Blogging has simply escalated that process. People pass around other people’s content because they haven’t got anything of their own to say, but want to say something, anything at all. It’s estimated that we will generate 988 exabytes of information online in 2010. That’s nothing to feel particularly awed about since most if it will be recycled information. In fact, all that statistic indicates is that the internet is the biggest wind tunnel ever built. I’m of the view that most bloggers are incapable of generating more than one original idea in the course of a lifetime. I do not exempt myself from that view.
6. The sheer volume of internet blether obscures from view the fact that our ability to communicate in this way is a fundamental freedom and the quality of the content we generate can trivialize our enjoyment of that fundamental freedom. I want to write well, but more than that, I want my writing to represent an honest stewardship of my freedom.
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Wed, Nov 25, 2009
Half-filtered