I am old enough to remember—ach, so many things—but one of them is that moment early in this century when it became common for one’s friends and relations to announce that they had started a blog.
This was rarely very welcome news. Firstly, most of one’s friends and relations, however admirable, do not write at all well, and blogging meant putting out continuous prose. Secondly, it is much easier to be interesting and charming in conversation than when shut up within the cold silence of the (web)page. Without an interlocutor, one is not so easily held back from expressing far too much about oneself and about one’s pet topics.
We are far more fascinating to ourselves than we are to others.
We are far more fascinating to ourselves than we are to others, and experiences may be deeply remarkable or exciting to us without being particularly resonant to anyone else. In conversation—unless one is an utter boor—one learns to select and temper (this is indeed a key part of growing up). With pre-internet publication, there was a similar imperative, because no money could be made from a book that only its author, and perhaps a handful of his nearest and dearest, would wish to read. The rise of the blog was an early manifestation of the internet’s revolutionary effect on publishing: henceforth anyone could publish anything, at little or no cost.
Significantly, the inspiration to begin a personal blog often came from travel. I have always disliked modern travel writing, even the (purportedly) good kind. I make an exception for Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques, but that book is largely about the traveler’s hopeless, lost ignorance. Hence its famous first sentence: “I hate voyages and explorers”.
Travel is far more exciting to the traveler than to those asked to hear, back home, his reminiscences. Even before we could all take hundreds of digital photographs a day, patience with holiday snapshots rarely matched their quantity. It is wonderful to see Venice or the Grand Canyon, but everyone’s impressions of Venice or the Grand Canyon are about the same, so that hearing what I made of them would hardly be worth your while. Moreover, in the era of rapid transport, the traveler is by definition just passing through: his understanding of what he has seen, of the people he has met, is superficial. Such rapid passages may still yield a handful of hilarious or horrifying anecdotes, but they will not produce a serious account of wherever the traveler has been.
The prominence of travel writing was illustrative of the blog’s tendency towards solipsism.
So the prominence of travel writing was illustrative of the blog’s tendency towards solipsism, of why it could be less than enthusing to hear a friend had started a blog. Yet, for all that, I have come to miss this sort of self-indulgent blog, and to respect those who carry on with the genre. Some of these bloggers, of course, have written much that is valuable, even if rough and rambling. But, above all, what has replaced the blog is something far worse: social media.
The blog, at least, demanded that one wrote at some length, and hence that one sought for something of substance to say. Social media drives us in the opposite direction: to reduce every thought and feeling to a bite-size phrase or—better still—a clip or picture. The blog enabled self-indulgence, but it did not reward it: most of those early bloggers gave up as they came to learn that even those closest to them had limited time for their musings. Social media, however, drives everyone to seek and find rewards: likes, clicks, re-posts. Bloggers put out their uncurated selves, only to find that nobody cared. Posters curate, or rather whore, themselves until they have fashioned a new self that will get attention.
We can make a poor showing when we write without the filter of others’ reactions. But we are far more awful when those reactions become all that matters to us.
