Thomas Rowlandson, The Doctor's Dream, Hand-coloured etching with aquatint, 112 X 185 mm. From: W. Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in search of the Picturesque, London 1812, pl.27
Content is king they say. Wait a moment, blogs are made to distract and sidetrack. Anyone who runs a blog knows there is a spike in readership on Monday around 9:30am, coincides with workers filing in for the hated jobs and desperately seeking a diversion to numb the routine pain, to forestall the inevitable, the crushing, dehumanizing assembly line of reality. Shirky described this as management of a “cognitive surplus”. Guess how the YouTube works?
Blogs are to our generation was sitcoms were to our parents and alcohol to our grandparents, the cheap analgesic with the reality avoidance promise. For a split second on your blog they forget the spreadsheet, the credit cards and the memos. Blogs are not about the “added value”, they are about the valuable moment taking users away from the hopelessness of the daily grind. It’s that millisecond on your page that stops the reality, soothes the pain of the financial and emotional pressures. All the elaborate blogging structure with comments, trackbacks, interesting facts, etc. is just a ruse to trick the readers into pretending they are having a meaningful experience. When you start a blog your job is to stone the readers out of their cognitive dissonance, while at the same time give them an excuse to imagine this was the most rewarding revelation of their lives. The art of blogging is in the skillful navigation between the tension and the pretension.
Image license courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Words fail me Ben. You're like the blogosphere's Kanye West.
Thank you, but I hear my homie doesn't like when people pretend to him…
Not surprising that you capture the essence of a blog's frivolity so masterfully. Yet surely you don't think that every blog is worthless, meaningless and/or uninformative or you wouldn't spend time creating such compelling prose. [a few typos/grammatical errors? in it but prob. missed by most]
and Kanye West doesn't propose questions to compel people to come up with their own solutions, he just tells people how they should think just as he does.
Truth is I have no idea what Kanye West “propose”.
As for grammar and typos I try to read and fix mistakes every time I revisit a post. I know this is not a proper way to do this but I need a distance of couple of hours to have a feel for the inconsistencies and the language. I go back and fix as much as I see, just like I did now.
Would like to discuss things w/ you but can only reach you via blog or twitter. Leaving rambling messages on your blog is becoming rather stalker-esque.
There is something else, teaching is the best learning, so perhaps blogging is a bigger analgesic for the writer.