McAllister,
I am glad, in your spirit, that I’ve finally made the move to leave everything behind and start fresh after so much internal debate and gnashing of teeth. I hope I can do justice to your no bullshit attitude moving forward.
I’d ask you to humour an internet junkie for a moment. I don’t believe in blogs as a viable form of writing anymore. There are too many blogs. Blogs are dead. Blogs are news magazines. Blogs are websites. Blogs are old news. Some blogs are fake news. I can remember when there were no blogs. People used to sit and write in their journals and keep shit to themselves. Now we have to tell everyone and it’s become increasingly difficult to find anything worth reading. I’ve returned to books. I can almost see your nod of approval.
Back in ‘the day’ of blogging, around 2002, David Weinberger wrote, “If you browse randomly through these 500,000 to a million Weblogs, most of them that you come across will be uninteresting to you. But, so what? It’s not that everybody on the Web is famous for 15 minutes. It’s that everybody on the Web is famous to 15 people.” In 2013 it was estimated the number of blogs had grown to over 152 million. Excuse my assault on your senses with internet stats, I know you don’t have the interest or the patience.
I’m not interested in my old writing. No one is really. No one goes back and reads old blog posts. I don’t anyway. Not mine. Not anyone else’s. We don’t have the time. The past is just that, passed. It doesn’t even exist anymore. Irrelevant.
We are about now. About economy. About disposability. We’ve got notifications to attend to. We read words and if they don’t instantly capture us, we dump them and move on. We don’t even read whole blog posts (or even articles in print?) anymore unless they are confirming what we already believe, filling a need, creating a warm fuzzy feeling or in some other way validating the desires of our individual ego. Get. To. The. Fucking. Point. If you don’t have your reader by the short and curlies in the first sentence. You’ve lost them. They’re gone. They just went and bought something online. They’ve forgotten about you.
I had some ideas whirling in my head earlier today that I thought were going to compose a what might be considered a ‘decent’ post and none of them made the cut. I don’t know where they are now. I had the idea to start making posts just one sentence long. And overwriting the previous one. It’s there, then it’s gone. You either get it or you don’t. It’s an instant. When you think about it, that’s about all there really is to life. One sentence at a time. Call it an experiment. Call it lazy. Call it an idea that someone else on the internet has probably already come up with – but I’m too lazy to look for it. In the end I bagged the whole idea because it seemed like too much work. And really, who cares. Postcards were sometimes little more than one sentence. Does anyone send those anymore? Instagram feeds are the new postcard.
Perhaps I’ll take to sending one sentence letters via conventional mail. I think I would miss the ability to read the expression on my recipients’ faces upon their opening of the letter. Or perhaps that’s the point. That’s the statement. The sentence was written days ago by the time they’ve read it. Worlds and Universes have occurred in the passing time and the sentence, no matter how profound, could no longer possibly be relevant. How did society ever exist without instant communication? What delicious patience those pre-internet people must have exhibited. I lived then, and can scarcely recall it now.
Smart of you to never get involved. Do make sure to keep your head down and pushing forward into the living air.
-b