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.