Print = prizes, cachet. Blogging = low barriers.
Blogs are often seen as an activity, a diversion, a hobby. Making books is a business. A serious one. It may even be art. There are conventions.
There’s still a certain reverence for print and publishing which is why so many of us are bitterly, sadly gleeful at its apparent demise. Giants on their knees is just good fun.
Anyway. My point. There is less cachet to being a blogger than to being, say, a novelist. The novel is a genre. The internet is a mess.
There’s more. Blogging is an apparently illegitimate activity rather than a pedigreed genre because it isn’t chosen, juried, sanctioned by experts and editors and gatekeepers.
It is notoriously hard to get published, and even more diffictult to get widely read even if you do make it to print. So print must be better quality, yes?
Sure. The daily grind to produce wears off the shine and the shrinks the time to spit and polish. Journalists have worn these shoes around the block a time or two.
And so, the argument goes, bloggers aren’t ‘writers’.
Lots of them aren’t. True enough.
I think it is a function of these things, but also novelty, and mass output which contributes to a lack of form or genre.
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On mass distribution. This has happened before. It was called the printing press – or “for younger readers, the 15th Century internet” – and as soon as it took off, so too did pornography. Everyone was making it. They were called “chapbooks”.
(LOVE that.)
So, back then, although it could be argued that all kinds of socially enriching materials were being printed – bibles, after all, were being cranked out – print as a medium didn’t have a lot of cachet. All those rabble rousers. And pornographers.
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18th and 19th C novels remind me of blogs. Pamela. Clarissa. Tristram Shandy. Later, Jane Eyre. All this overheard conversation, witty, complicated word-play, direct addresses to gentle readers, commentary on the social conventions of the day (especially The Woman Question) via spying and prying into other people’s lives, and interior dramas, and minute mundane dramas of daily life, mostly framed up by sex (who was having it or plotting to have it). In short, my blog.
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When the USSR became Russia, a very similar thing happened. The absence of firebreathing censors was accompanied by a blossoming of, well, porn.
A guy I used to know, Adam Jones, wrote a very long thesis-cum-book on this subject. He thinks there is a pattern in formerly communist countries or countries transitioning into democracy. Regime falls, censorship is dead, and a rush of sexually explicit content ensues.
I might not be helping my argument here.
The point is that the internet is still a toddler. Or maybe a horny teenager.
The teenager analogy might be less disturbing. Let’s keep it.
It’s new(ish). Publishing tools are in the hands of many. Hence, porn and lots of everything else. And all this new, and porn, and lots and lots of everything creates the connotation of “low quality”. Internet writing, therefore, is low-brow. The official print industry, with its cherry-picking and jurying and experts and editors, and internal friction slowing dissemination, is a filter. Quality. It has genres and juried prizes.
My thought is that we need to think about blogging as an infant genre.
It already is a genre (perhaps). It has tropes and conventions: lists, how-tos, snappy headlines, carving text up into sections with headers (hate that) leading/ending with questions, a pressing emphasis on short (250-750 words).
Those tropes and conventions bore me a little (a lot). I like wild, caterwauling, cartwheeling prose. The lack of friction, the lack of oversight, should mean an explosion of freedom and experimentation in the blogosphere. Instead we’re copywriting ourselves into taupe prose.
We’re all doing what everyone else is doing.
Which got me thinking about techniques and methods and a theory of blogging. As in: can we please get a few more of all of them?
Alan Moore moans in his porno essay that porn is everywhere but nowhere is it art.
(I think he fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of porn. Have you ever watched arty porn? Do you want to? I thought not. It is profoundly un-sexy and sometimes comical. But not funny in a good, on-purpose way.)
No, while I disagree with his thrust that porn should be artistic (it could be, go right on ahead, but I would be happy if the sets were just a little better decorated), I do plan to apply his argument to blogging.
Blogs are everywhere and nowhere are they art.
Except that’s not entirely true. I DO think that there are people doing wildly interesting, surprising, freewheeling, bucking-boring-conventions writing, in blog-form.
And I do see people using blogs to mull on and challenge social conventions. With skill.
There are writers – bloggers – arching their backs and curving in and out of experimentation and questioning and creating. In short, creating art.
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Blogs don’t all have to be artified. I don’t mind if we keep dispensing how-to tips and writing bulleted lists and top ten blah blah blahs.
Those are useful.
But we can have more. We can do more. We can start thinking about creative practices and methods and media to juice up and transform our blogs.
and our world. Because if print is dead (it’s not), then it’s all on us.
Thanks to the wonderful people that brought us post modernism, anything can be art. My opinion is that post modernism is over though, so I don’t know where that leaves us.
Have you read Lost Girls yet? It’s on my to-read list, and seems to be all of Alan Moore’s crazy ass Porno thoughts in action.
It’s kinda strange that my iPhone automatically capitalizes “Porno”.
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Kelly Diels
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 6:33 am
@Deacon, I have not read it. I’ll look it up.
Your iPhone has ideas.
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I’m with you on this, in that I too enjoy “interesting, surprising, freewheeling…..”
But the issue isn’t with the publishers, it’s with the consumers of content.
Right now, the majority want bullet ridden, headline laden prose they can scan in 7 seconds, and move on to the next post in their readers.
To become huge and mainstream, is that what you have to provide today?
If you look down the centuries, different genres have been “the mainstream.”
Come to think of it, the only thing that has endured is porn!
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Kelly Diels
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 6:30 am
@Mike CJ, I’m struggling with this. I go back and forth about it.
Studies show that it is just the way we read online (the F pattern, Jakob Nielsen). So maybe I should stop wringing my hands about it.
In addition, and I said this before in another comment, maybe I should just realize that my blog is not my only medium, and that all the things I want to do that don’t fit here, can just go somewhere else.
“Come to think of it, the only thing that has endured is porn!” – you just summed up Alan Moore’s looooooooooooong history-of-porn essay in a sentence.
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Dave Doolin
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 4:23 pm
@Kelly Diels, Nielsen’s website is really ugly and hard to read.
He’s stuck in 1999.
Ironic.
I have *a lot* to say about the whole issue, but it’s going to have to wait until I get a chance to read more carefully rather than skim comments.
However, I suspect if you build an audience of 100,000 readers, what mainstream publishers think is a moot point.
BBL
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First, books will always be with us, albeit in much smaller numbers. The greenies will be happy that less trees are getting the chop and will in future start saying that only evil people buy paper books.
I don’t know who these skimmers are, but I tend to read every word of most posts. I learn more.
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Kelly Diels
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 6:27 am
@Gordie, I love books with an unholy fervour.
I only skim if it isn’t very good.
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I seem to recall that when Monet & his group began to exhibit that Impressionism WAS NOT ART. At its inception, photography WAS NOT ART. And of course Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, etc. WAS NOT ART. Of course
Illustration–from Mucha to today’s digital 3D IS NOT ART.
What I have noticed is that those making these assinine pronouncements are rarely artists themselves. Hmmm.
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Kelly Diels
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 6:25 am
@Julianne Fuchs-Musgrave, oh Julianne, FANTASTIC point.
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yes julianne! and picasso said ‘Bad artists copy. Good artists steal’. There is a lot of copy-blogs, of samey-near-enough blogs, that regurgitate content and stay safe, easy.
And then there are the few blogs that steal from every other medium and shake em up and make them blog-like-art. Because we don’t want it to be the same right? shouldn’t art be unexpected? shouldn’t blog-art contain anti-skim content that makes our hearts beat?
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You had me at “Giants on their knees.”
Ha!
Yeah, their are some blogs doing some wonderfully artistic things, but even a half decade into the game, we’z all just getting started.
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People doing wildly wonderfully and artistic things are rarely rewarded by the larger culture, no matter the medium.
What bores me most lately…meta blogging.
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Kelly Diels
replied:
on February 3rd, 2010 at 4:15 pm
@Christine (Blisschick) Reed, ummm. like this? hahahaha.
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what sean said about “giants on their knees” – that’s exactly what i was going to say. shoot. i’ll just get an earlier start next time.
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I love this for so many reasons…but especially the very end. Because sometimes I feel this big “SHOULD” – like I should write those top 10 posts, etc. But I CAN’T. I’m allergic. So I’m writing what I want to write. I’m exploring. And I seem to be having an impact. I mean even if I make just one reader feel connected, then I’ve done my job.
And my writing always makes ME feel good – and you’ve gotta love that.
Paving our own way. Prestige and money be damned – ish. I know they’ll coming. Oh wait! Look! They already are.
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I always laugh when people say that bloggers aren’t writers. I am a writer who is also a blogger. I don’t let others define me, I define myself.
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With blogs, Google is the gatekeeper. But Twitter has opened the floodgates. Now artists (aka bloggers) can bypass the filters (aka publishers) and create. The cream will rise to the top. Some of it will be low brow, some high brow. The artistic tools are becoming very affordable and accessible which means that the cream will become very delicious, rich and decadent. Nummy.
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Maybe there will be a market for printed blogs in the future. I for one have learned a ton of things about writing from blogs, without having to wade through a book for the same information. I do so love books for everything else though. You cant beat sticking a paperback in your pocket and heading to the mountains. Laptop, iPhone etc just doesn’t cut it.
Justin
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“No, while I disagree with his thrust that porn should be artistic”
You certainly out did yourself with that play on words haha.
In all seriousness…thoroughly enjoyed this. Love how you broght in the “invention” (Johannes Gutenberg actually stole it from the Chinese) of the printing press which lead to the mass production of pornography and the bible.
I think it should be pointed out that Gutenberg printing the Bible in German was a direct form of rebellion considering the dogma of the time forbid the Bible to be printed in anything but Latin. He was making a statement, giving a “back hand, with the dip, bust the lip” facial slap of the authority of the time. So the point is, whether we’re talking about pornography or religion here… like most movements, this one too started with an act of rebellion.
That’s how I see bloging at least… a small act of rebellion against the elite-ishness of print. To bad it seems that the rhythm most bloggers are finding nowadays relies on bullet points and lists like you said. Hope this little child of print can find her own identity soon. Thanks, K-Diels, for being the unruly sexually active highschool daughter of the blogging scene.
Peace,
Me.
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Loved this! Still trying to figure out how to express myself in this strange medium . . .
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I love that blogging has blown down the doors of status and privilege because now many multitudes are unafraid to hit publish and put it out there.
I don’t care about the junk either because there’s always been X parts junk to 1 part art in everything. There are X people that will call my writing junk for every 1 that can’t get enough.
that’s the beast of creativity.
I’m just grateful that the quantity of 1-part-art has exploded and it’s in my hands ready to rock my life. I’m grateful I can hit publish right now, system and politics be damned.
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I’ve been really fed up with the blogosphere lately, mostly because of the “we’re all doing what everyone else is doing” thing. I hate that some days my reader is filled with static. I hate that I sometimes buy into the static and that I feel like if I don’t monetize this or e-Book that, I’m out of the loop, or worse yet, irrelevant.
So, like Julie Roads said above, I’m getting back to “…writing what I want to write. I’m exploring. And I seem to be having an impact. I mean even if I make just one reader feel connected, then I’ve done my job.
And my writing always makes ME feel good – and you’ve gotta love that.”
Good post.
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In bed, just last night, I was told that I loved books more than anyone she has ever known…I was deeply flattered.
For me no e-book or blog will replace print. I don’t want to snuggle my technology at night. My book? Yes. And I love bookmarks and pens and journals and the stack beside my bed and book covers and the smell of them.
There is a place for both and I love the free-for-all that is the Internet. The cream (cough, sputter) rises to the top, yes? Great stuff gets found because of the enduring value of word of mouth. But now it isn’t exclusive. That’s bad in some ways, but fantastic in others.
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1) I love the word caterwauling.
2) I am a neophyte to the blogging world, and am still fighting with publicly referring to myself as a writer (though that is what I have always WANTED to refer to myself as, and have, in fact, been writing since I was ten years old).
Labels are tricky things. We hate when others mis-label us (in our eyes), but we proudly proclaim ourselves as “x-ers” (writers, painters, runners, etc). Really the labels themselves are meaningless. If you write, then you are a writer (given the nature of blogs, most bloggers are also writers).
Of course, there is a very big part of myself that still desperately wants to be publicly given the moniker “writer.” Such tricky beings we humans are, n’est-ce pas?
3) Have just found your blog and bookmarked it. Love it
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The model is different — you don’t send 90-95% of your income to a Publisher for sharing a route to market — but if you’re writing and I’m reading then that makes you a Writer in my book. The style and purpose of the blog tend to define the level of writing as art within the blog.
After that it is a matter of degrees I suppose — how many readers do you have? How much income can you command from site sponsors?
If having a paper book is a draw for you, it is becoming easier and less costly to self-publish, get something listed on Amazon, and pass off fulfillment to a vendor. I understand the siren song of a printed book to make you a PUBLISHED author. But it is good to remember that it is the writing and not the medium that makes for good reading.
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Love the post. Gotta say I disagree with a couple of comments toward the top though. I don’t want top 10 lists all day every day. I consider posts of that sort (blogs of that category) as filler. They’re not hard to think about, not hard to produce and mostly lazily written. It’s the junk food of writing. And it’s offensive to this reader who happens to be a trained journalist yet considers himself a blogger more and more. Substance is worthwhile. It’s just so far and few between. I think we lose that with the (sorry to say it) Darren Rowse style of blogging.
Good, compelling writing will always have a place. Whether in blogs or in print. And the good writers, as they say, want more than a 1000 words every time.
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A breath of fresh air in the world of blogging. (OK, I don’t get out much and found your blog as a result of a guest post on some other blog – don’t ask which as I won’t remember.)
Real, honest and interesting … and not trying, ever so subtly, to sell me something I don’t really need.
I actually *read* your blogs, not just skim them.
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Tasty food for thought. I read an article on Mashable yesterday summing up the results of a discussion called The Future Jounralist: Thoughts from Two Generations. The two people found much to learn from each other, and to mix together for more tasty results. Better that, in my opinion, than a black and white, one option dominating (or denegrating) the other. Check it out: http://mashable.com/2010/02/05/future-journalist-thoughts/
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I enjoyed your post. I’m an infant in this “blogosphere” absorbing all that I can. I just finished week one in my 30 day challenge. The main reason I am doing this, to push myself to be vulnerable…to let others see me.
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Hurrah for “wild, caterwauling, cartwheeling prose.”
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