I began blogging some time around 1999-2001. I was somewhere in the range of eight to eleven years old, and under the delusion that people would care about my opinions on the world.
I didn’t even have an idea of what a blog was at the time*- I just wanted to have my own website to tell people how much I liked awesome things like video games and pudding. I believe it ended up having over twice as much content as your average internet blogs- I made it all the way to five posts before I abandoned it. From there on out, I have been blogging and posting online in a variety of ways. For a period of a few years in my teenage days, the Gawker Network had some of the most popular websites around, and I spent a lot of time posting in the comments on their pages. Now, at the time, Gawker had an invite-only comment system, and posts would only have a handful of comments. This meant that commenters were basically unpaid content contributors to their sites. I didn’t really care at the time, because my posts were being read by tens of thousands of people, while my personal blogs would pull in may a few hundred hits a year.
Over time, this system died off in favor of the mass market system of commentating that has turned the internet into a cesspool. With the advent of Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, etc, etc, there is no longer any time for anybody to actually consume meaningful content on the internet. Humanity has always been marked by a slavish adherence to already established social groups and constructs, resulting in the majority of the populace never extending their thought processes beyond memetic behavior. However, in prior times, the barrier of entry to production of content was fairly costly, allowing for a sort of an elite/passion-based centralization of new material to engage with. Now, we are all far too busy producing our own content to waste our time reading through a complex multi-page screed on anything. Your adherence to factions is not demonstrated by your consumption of key figureheads as much as it is defined by your ability to regurgitate the party line in your own style, on your form of social media. This leaves very little room for blogging.
Now, as much as I enjoy getting distracted from the topic at hand, I feel that this backstory is actually vital information for understanding the rhetoric of blogging, my relationship with it, and this blog in particular. Blogging isn’t some brave new experience for me. Blogging isn’t even relevant to my world, or really the world of anybody under the age of 30, anymore. Blogging is what old people do in order to adapt their understanding of dead tree formats to cyberspace. Because of this, when I blog or write anything long, I make sure to do it with a lampshade on my head and tongue in cheek. While this makes it somewhat difficult to see what I am typing, I see it as the most logical course of action when faced with the absurd. The only people who will actually be reading these sorts of posts are the people who are already in on the joke of reality, or at least possessing the potential to see that joke**. This also, hopefully, has the benefit of creating a more readable and enjoyable experience. I don’t need to pretend like I’m actually trying to do something serious that the whole world is going to judge from every angle- I’m aiming to make something that my super limited audience will be able to appreciate on more than just the surface level. Which, as I’ve said, is pretty antithetical to the concept of the modern internet.
**Keep reading my blog, and I’ll keep showering you with claims that you’re smarter and prettier than ordinary people.
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