Predicting the blog clog: Kundera saw it all
There are an awful lot of blogs these days (and a lot of them, no doubt, are awful).
Technorati tracks about 57 million blogs, with a little over half of them regarded as “active”—meaning that the bloggers post at least once every three months, which doesn’t sound all that active to me. Ex-bloggers outnumber current bloggers: there are 200 million of the former.
What drives those of us who persevere? It helps to have an audience, I must confess. But the impetus is mostly internal. The majority of the bloggers I’ve met are people with ideophoria, who’ve been plagued—or blessed, take your pick—all their lives by active minds crowded with thoughts that they want to express. A blog certainly gives them the forum for that.
Predictions are that the trend will peak in 2007 because of saturation of both readers and bloggers. And it’s true that many people I know simply aren’t interested in reading blogs, or in spending any more time online than they already do, and probably never will be. Their habits are set, and they get their news through print, TV, and radio. With each new generation, though, my guess is that the blogosphere will continue to grow, although how much is anyone’s guess.
Favorite author Milan Kundera has already weighed in on the matter, of course. In his wonderful Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), he foresaw the ultimate consequences of it all, although not the mechanism (computers and blogs).
And so this post is just a sneaky way to get in this quote from Kundera:
The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: “We are all writers!”
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
I don’t understand…
technorati.comNeo,
I just wrote an article for the local paper and the latest numbers (as of July) are 97 million blogs being tracked by Technorati.
http://www.technorati.com/about/
Yes, but not tracked well if at all.
I appreciate the need — nay, the compulsion — to slip the Kudera quote in whenever possible, but I don’t think this one maps to blogs all that well.
Blogs strike me as more of the prime upheaval of, even the triumph of, the Feuilleton. In other words as, in general, a series of footnotes or “tags of opinion” attached like dubious remora to the “issues of the day.”
That is, I would add, for blogs in the main: See a story, make a comment. See a comment, comment on the comment which commented on the comment which was commenting on the story which was a report of an action or perhaps, in the end, just a comment made by someone with access to the mighty media megaphone.
These are the pages of which Memeorandum is made.
There are some blogs, present page included, that struggle at times to work in the long form or to make something that is not just a tag, a comment, or a Feuilleton. These people work in a sphere that is nicely set apart from the media core and do have something of value to say.
Those will be the people who just keep going because, well, now that they have a place to have their say at at last, nobody can shut them up.
Well, I admit that quote may have been just a tad tangential. But it did feed my Kundera habit. And the need to look up the word “Feuilleton” fed my research habit.
I do not mean to trash Kundera, but I think Nietzsche said it better: “that everyone can learn to read will ruin, in the long run, not only reading, but thinking too.”
For some, like me, blogs fill the same general purpose that sitting around with neighbors and fellow townfolk at the general store and chit chatting used to fill.
As mean and hateful as I can tend to be these days, I’d be a hella lot worse if I only had my own thoughts and ideas bouncing around in the echo chamber of my empty noggin.
Thank you for the effort you take to share yourself with the rest of us.
My main news source for in-depth coverage is the Internet/blogs. I do not accept the information when supposedly factual, though, unless there is a link and then I check that information. Therefore I spend, what most would surmise, as too much time on my computer. I do this because I have lost complete faith in the major media to present facts as just that, facts. I do watch FOX, but I find myself E-mailing them corrections on their factual reporting or obvious omissions and the supposed facts that some of their contributors state. I find it difficult to understand how those whose primary job is to dispense factual information seem to have difficulty in doing so. I guess this is my reaction to having seen so much manipulation of the news during the Vietnam era and afterwards while having no ability to challenge the media.
In the beginning was the word, and the word…..WAS!
Kundera and Nietzsche referenced in one post and comments? Heady stuff. I think I’ll have to quit blogging altogether. I can’t compete with all of this intellectual noise. I think I’ll write a book….
I can understand why Kundera would feel threatened by the idea of “everyone is a writer.” His sense of specialness, to say nothing of his very livelihood, are at stake.
Bookstores and libraries are full of junk, as well as treasure. Most “scholarship” from academia and think tanks are trash, but the gems are there to be found. Likewise blogs have their share of refuse and some golden riches.
The internet is the larger world of ideas that must be filtered and sifted for treasure. It requires work, but it has always required work. Specialists can still achieve their goals, but generalists are hopelessly buried underneath all of the words, images, sounds, and video clips.
The software tools for keeping up with what is worthwhile are still being developed.
Concepts of how to salvage more time in a day are at a more inchoate stage.
Bloggers are to the average person as T9 text messaging is to Grandpa. Imagine the world of information flow when the T9 user is a Grandpa. That technology, whatever it is, will bring a blessing (or a plague) of ideophoria.
And Neo, how did you get linked to Opera Houses–I thought you were tone deaf.
Well… whatever.
I like what you write. I check your page all the time. Don’t stop.
Fontana: funny you should write about Kundera feeling threatened by the idea of so many writers. The paragraph directly before the ones I quoted goes like this:
“Someone who writes books is either everything (a unique universe in himself and to all others) or nothing. And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, all of us who write books are nothing.We are unrecognized, jealous, embittered, and we wish the others dead.”
He seems to get it—although the passage is somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Agent (trying to sell a mediocre manuscript): Well, you know what they say: ‘Everybody’s got a story to tell.’
Publisher: Yes, but I don’t have to publish them!
And that’s the way it is. There’s a lot of dreck out there, whether blogs or books, magazines or ‘news’papers. Adults learn to figure out what’s worth reading and what’s worth ignoring.
Neo, you’re worth reading! 😀
The act of writing is unloved by readers who see finished works and are tricked into thinking how easy it is to be a writer–to write. Few would look at sculptures and imagine their hands at the task. No, no, no. That’s for masters of an art. But writing! Writing is democratic. It’s available. It’s easy. But of course that’s nonsense. Writing is a pain in the ass, and too few have given themselves fully enough to the task to understand.
My wife is a published writer; she makes her living writing. I’ve watched her emerge from her office, reading glasses at the end of her nose, stray hairs hanging across her face. She makes a cup of coffee, grumbles about her work and fades back into her writing. When she’s not at her desk she’s in school refining her craft. This is her vocation and her lifestyle. It’s not a diversion. It’s not romantic. Perhaps this is the state Kundera was in when he scribbled his pessimism into his text. He left his desk, rumpled and distracted, to get a sandwich and was waylaid by his plumber who proudly announced he was a writer, too. Almost anyone can put words on a page, but very few are writers.
I like Neo’s writing too particularly because I have a lot in common – therapist, New England New York background, and I dwell among lefties who have tried to shut me up, but in Australia. The resulting inner pressure, perhaps like Neo, caused me to blog at yankeewombat.com. It has really helped me develop my political understanding and been good discipline and therapy too. That said, Kundera seems to have predicted the chaos of the blogosphere, but as McLuhan predicted new media create totally unanticipated phenomena. For example, TV gave one man – Walter Cronkite – the power to significantly alter the public perception of the Vietnam war. An Army of Davids in the Blogosphere has significantly altered the ability of TV to control public perception of the Iraq war. All in all, it is a great privilege to be part of it.
Iglude: speaking of Cronkite and how he altered perceptions of the Vietnam war, I don’t know whether you’ve read these two posts, my efforts at discussing that very topic:
http://neoneocon.com/2006/12/18/tet-cronkite-opinion-journalism-and/
http://neoneocon.com/2006/12/20/tet-cronkite-opinion-journalism-and_21/
Blogs are as varied as the people who have them. It’s true that most of them (and many would lump mine into this category) are junk. There are enough interesting ones to more than make up for blogs like mine.
The idea that you can express your opinion to potentially millions of people is a catchy one, but few realize how much work it is to keep even a halfway decent blog.
Nice quote!
Re. ‘instant content creation’, I came across the following boast on Linked In:
“I am a professional writer with thousands of books in circulation …”
Poor old James Joyce wrote only three or four!