Why a blog?
I suspect the only real answer is ‘Why not a blog?’. After all, everyone else is doing it, committing their idle thoughts to an online site which cares not at all what they write, why they write, how often or when, and whether what they write is of any worth.
That, looking to the oft-used metaphor of the monkeys and the typewriters, is about as simple as it gets… one more blogger… one more chance of something worth reading… one more blog… one more chance something I’ve ever written is worth spending two minutes reading.
Fifteen years ago when the internet was just gathering pace, the mantra was ‘content is king’. If you had good content on your website, the theory went, you were bound to attract an audience, a readership, a following… currently (June 2015) the internet has jumped the shark, and it really is only the beginning flare of the bell curve. Depending on whose figures you accept, Facebook grows by well over a million users a week, or Instagram users add over a billion new images every week, or the internet grows by over 4.5 million pages every month, or…
Well, you see the problem. No-one has time to read all that stuff, or look at all those amazing images of people showing you the food they ate in a restaurant last night, or where they went for holiday, or the funny vegetable shaped like a body part, or their friend Trudi’s dog, who is so funny it can suck the tip of its tail.
Content is no longer king. Content is the iceberg which may well sink the whole damn experience, seeing as how very much less than 90% of all content is revealed and very much more than that lurks below the waterline in our perfect world, waiting to stove in the sides and scupper the good ship upon which we float. Is that horrible thought – that we can submerge ourselves in ‘data’ – even a possibility?
Well, sure it is, if you believe ‘the experts’. It is the experts, trendologists, futurists and imagineers who now postulate that the world is under threat from data loss, an event so significant that it may – if it comes to pass – throw our civilisation back to pre-Internet days. Imagine, if you can, as they do, an enormous surge of electromagnetic energy unleashed upon the world telecommunications networks. The damage, we are assured, would be sufficient to fry all the capacitors and resistors and microchips around; sufficient to melt down the hard disk arrays and electronic storage devices the world over, and deep fry every mobile device and personal computer around. That, we are assured, would be A Bad Thing.
That it would be A Bad Thing I do believe, because increasingly we cannot function without the connectivity which our modern world demands. Cash is on the way out; everyone pays with a swipe of the credit card. Personal accounts and banking is increasingly done online, shopping is done online. Friends’ birthdays are celebrated online, and ostracism awaits those who do not play the game of Facebook Celebration. Moreover, universities and libraries no longer purchase books, except under special circumstances. Study is done online, entire collections are digitised and made available to virtual classes of virtual students as links and downloads.
So, the argument goes, we cannot imagine what might be lost from our repository of knowledge and human history if the internet was destroyed. I can. I imagine what might be lost from the store of medical knowledge and procedure. From the human genome sequencing project. From the digital world of artwork, of popular music, and of science and technology, and a thousand other areas of human achievement. And it scares me.
I will not mourn the incessant chattering of those who employ this amazing technology for the ego-stroking gain such as Facebook offers. I don’t care that Myspace went the way of the dodo (it did, didn’t it?), or that twats who tweet get themselves in trouble because they’ve not learned to think before they send.
As a media professional, I see it as even more vacuous. In universities the world over, tutors tell their students the way to succeed is to have a fulsome personal profile, or portfolio, yet are unable to tell those students how to find a real paying job in a shrivelled media market. ‘Make sure you are an active Twitter user’, and ‘Your Facebook account is the first thing a potential employer will look at’ they are told. Surely their skills and abilities, their powers of comprehension, and their mastery of complex news issues all rate more than a passing glance.
I am adding to the inconsequence of the blogosphere not just because I can, nor because I wish to, nor even because I must. It is simpler than that. As Descartes so effortlessly flubbed the emphasis when he applied the maxim; ‘I think therefore I am’.
rustyalex 