23,000 BLOGS A DAYWriting In The Age of Blogdom
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23,000 BLOGS A DAY Writing In The Age of Blogdom |
Here is a rather breathtaking fact cited in a recent Jonah Goldberg column: According to the blog search-engine firm Technorati, 23,000 new blogs are created every day—or roughly one every three seconds. Let's imagine, for argument's sake, that amid this staggering new daily output, ten excellent, must-read blogs are created— a wildly generous estimate. That means every single day there are 22,990 new blogs on the Internet that almost nobody, save a small group of friends and co-workers, will ever read or care about. That's fine, but it's not exactly a sweeping endorsement for the power of the medium as whole.
It is quite possible that every single person on this planet could conceivably have a blog. 300 million blogs in the USA alone, and billions worldwide. It won't happen, but it could. I celebrate the technological capacity for every one to have a voice on the internet. 100 years ago (hell, even 10 years ago) this was a pipe dream. Technology, while a neutral medium, is still wondrous.
The priviledge of cyber-freedom has been bestowed. So now, the issue is not whether you can express your online opinions. That is settled. You can. By all means, go at it.
Instead, the issue is what you will say, and how you will say it. In other words, within a priviledge of expression a given, the issue now is one of competence. You have to write about something interesting, and you have to do it in a way that engages—if you want readership, that is.
The blog, as a product of the pluralist worldview that deeply values diversity, is the single greatest example, too, of the limits of this worldview. It is impossible to read every single blog every single day, and nor would people want to. As a reader, you have to make choices, and make distinctions between deep and superficial quality, and even just quality and a lack of quality. How do we make these distinctions? We do this in countless ways, of course. But my view is that at the end of the day, people want to read quality. They want to read what a good writer that to say.
And it is precisely in the intuitive choices readers make about what bloggers they read that we can see that there are still standards of quality involved, at least with writing (though I don't believe whatsoever that standards are limited to writing). Once we clear a space, in this case cyberspace, and literally allow anyone with the gumption a fair hearing, it is a plain as day that some people write better than others.
There are standards to good writing, and we can see this because good writers exhibit, then bend and break these rules in their writing. And as readers, we just know when there is quality. Good writing feels like good writing. There is a hum, the words create momentum, there is a drama, or we laugh in the middle of a paragraph. We go away wanting to tell our friends about this cool thing we read. Or, we blog about it.
Since we have lived through the rise of free verse, gonzo journalism, the new age movement, standards today are more hidden than in the days one-room-schoolhouse-grammar-classes. Pluralism tends to want to transcend old definitions of good and bad. But standards have not been demolished. Today, standards have to do with basic coherance, the ability to include various points of view and perspectives in your own, the ability to engage the reader, communicate something of value, and create the conditions in your prose where the reader is allowed to suspend disbelief.
These standards are not imposed from some higher authority, or a bunch of disembodied linguistic PhDs holed up in an Oxford library back room. There isn't some secret code to crack, or subliminal signals to be told about if you know the right people. You don't have to read an 800 page book about proper prose execution, nor spend $100,000 to attend Yale.
No, today's standards are naturally born. Standards are self-evident. The written word is a by-product of the spoken word, which is necessarily part of the social sphere. In other words, we write to be understood. We write in various dialects - literally 'between-talk'. Language is social technology. The moment you want your writing to be groked by someone else, then certain natural rules of basic human to human interaction rush forth. A composition professor did not invent these - they are hard-wired into our human brains.
'Natural standards' mean that the standards are self-evident. You want to talk with your friend? Okay, you can do so all you want, to your heart's content. I think that you can intuitively find the right way to talk, so that you are coherant. If you step back afterwards and take a look, you will see that what made your communication coherant in that situation applies to every situation. It is part of the deal when you want to talk or write to someone. So it is basic coherancy that is part of our human wiring. Basic coherancy is part of the fabric of social consciousness. Through the standard of coherancy, souls commune. Our hearts exchange juice. We touch someone else, and they massage us. This is common sense, in the best manner of the term.
Given the great liberty that us contemporary folk have with the written word (given the rise of free verse, et al, mentioned above), the great responsibility we have is to follow and work within the evolving but quite real standards of coherancy in our cultures. We have more chances that ever to be misunderstood. As easily as anything, we can create our own personal lingos, cloak our souls in endless irony, use sentences that trail off with the infernal elipsis (...), or express needless ambiguity.
In other words, formally, we can do anything we want with the written word. To temper this freedom, our responsibility is to be as clear as we can. We can to return again and again to the basic injunction of communication - share an understanding. To do so is an act of compassion, of love, of sensitivity to the reader, one that recognizes that there is a precious soul beyond the eyes that follow these sentence lines, back and forth across the page.
All standards of writing today follow this dogma of coherance. 'Dogma' originally meant "seems right". Sadly, this has changed, because it is a rather nice word, phonetically. Contemporary connotation aside, it feels right to aim for and expect coherance in the world's writing. It feels right, as I like to say, that our writing would entertain, educate, and enlighten.
And this goes for blogs. The main reason blogs fail to be read is because of an infallible habit of confusion on the part of the writer. The bad news of blogdom is that it supports as much bad writing as it does good writing. There is no editor beyond the writer, and no institutional obstacles to distribution in the blogosphere.
This even further supports the need for coherance in today's writing. If something is not coherant, readers have all the right in the world to completely ignore it, and they usually do in that case. To track the unique visitors and hits on our blogs is an important (if impersonal) gauge of our written coherance. Personal feedback is also important.
So you want to be read by others? Fight like hell to frame your ideas in a way that makes sense to others. That is the important work we all must do, every day as a writer. There is no getting around this, at any point. So take solace that every writer faces this task.
Beyond that, you can start to employ various marketing bells and whistles that are commonly known and used in mass communication. But get ahold of your ideas first, and write and revise until you get to a sustained pulse. You'll know it when you feel it, and so will your readers.
Everyone can learn to write, no exceptions. The more, as readers, that we insist on the standard of coherance, the more we challenge and support our bloggers to develop the voices that they want to have. We will all benefit from this clarity. A blogosphere of clear and resonant voices -- now that is a product of pluralism to celebrate and cherish.
But in truth, the cause of that resonance is an awareness that is beyond pluralism - a post-pluralist awareness. The particulars of this new awareness are just coming clear, though many people give such a spaciousness plenty of naked lip-service. I am excited by the reality -- not mere idea -- of 'beyond pluralism'. It means that we have chewed and digested the nutrition of pluralism, without the acid reflux of a standard-less society. And in my opinion, coherance is dogma #1 of a post-pluralist, some would say 'integral', way of feeling, being, thinking, and doing in the world. No exceptions.
Link to Goldberg's Column
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