The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Blogosphere: The What and Why of This Blog

In this post I address a question that I left open in the last one: what kind of a blog will this be?

I’m afraid I don’t really have a simple and precise answer to that. One vague notion that I do have is to make this a bit like a very general-topic newspaper column. You know: the kind that could pick up just about any topical affair and scrutinize it, express opinions about it; or might just as well get all laid-back and muse about some old anecdote or a historical fact; or perhaps ruminate about some funny, or sad, little everyday incident that piqued the columnist’s interest the other day. The topic could be anything, but there would be a recognizable style and a way of dealing with the topics in the blog. It would be drawing from a variety sources, pointing out some surprising connections and contrasts between the topic and some other phenomena or ideas or theories. That could be my goal; that, and to do it with some humor.

So there will not be any one specific field that I will be covering in this blog. To narrow it down as much as I can, and put some label on it, I could say that this will be a semi-philosophical, cultural-anthropological blog with a sociological twist. Of course, that doesn’t narrow it down very much, because just about anything can be viewed as a cultural-anthropological and a social phenomenon and considered from a (semi-)philosophical point of view. But perhaps, since I am best familiar with Finnish culture and reasonably well familiar with the more general, broadly Western – European and North-American – culture,  it would make sense to assume that I will mostly be discussing issues related to those cultural spheres and dealing with them mainly with conceptual tools rooted in those same spheres.

Some of you, the ones with some experience in blogosphere, will now smirk, thinking that this will not be a very good blog, then. You are probably right. This will in all likelihood be a wretched, pitiful, piece of shiatsu blog.

That, at least, judging by the few blogs about blogging that I would take a look at before starting. One thing that all those blogs about blogs (blog-blogs?) had in common was that they stressed how crucially important it is to have a sharp focus, a specific topic, a definite niche in mind for the blog. That was the blog-bloggers’ First Rule of Blogging, in effect. The Second Rule of Blogging was that the topic would have to be something that one is really, really passionate about – something that one could keep talking about endlessly.

The reasoning was that, people read blogs mainly to find answers to some specific kinds of questions, and if your blog isn’t really providing – week in, week out – precisely the kind of answers that they are looking for (specifically about cooking, for example, or gardening, or fashion and lifestyle, or computer games, or travelling, or Manchester United, or Japanese architecture, or ice-hockey, or politics, or some TV-series, or Hollywood celebrities, or a musical genre or some band, or whatever), if it instead discusses any random topic in one post and something very different in the next, then the readers will obviously look elsewhere. The blog will not be attracting following. And that would be a bad thing, I suppose.

Okay, that makes sense, yes; but the main problem I am having with these basic rules of blogging is that I don’t think that there is any very restricted topic that I would care to go on about “endlessly.” Well, maybe something related to my work: I could write almost endlessly about some philosophical or social theoretical topics, for instance; but I do not feel like starting a professional or a strictly academic blog. I already write about those things many hours a day and the idea of doing even more of the same in my free time feels somewhat repulsive. Second, I really, really don’t see myself as a “one topic man”: I have many interests in life, and I most certainly won’t be starting several blogs to cover a number of them. I have a life to live, mind you, so one blog – and one, two or at most three posts per month – will have to do. (I am the kind of guy who takes his sweet, sweet time with anything he publishes, rewrites everything several times over more often than not, so that alone will prevent me from publishing several posts per week, even when I get an inspiration right away.)

So, will anybody be reading the blog? Therein lies the question, I suppose. I would certainly not be expecting any mass following; no Blogger of the Year Award for me, most probably. And I am fairly certain that I won’t be making any money out of this; though, that said, I admit that the economic possibilities of blogs remain rather hazy to me and I actually have no competence to estimate the likelihood of some big-ass company contacting me and offering thousands of euros for a good review of their toothpaste or whatever. (Go ahead and suggest that, please, all you big companies – I will probably sell out immediately, I could be your bitch!)

They probably won’t be contacting me though, if only so many people read this blog. And why should people read my blog!? I have no reason to offer, nothing. I might make an interesting point every once in a while, or say something slightly amusing, but there are no doubt thousands of blogs that make more interesting points and make you laugh so hard that you will be pissing yourself, and present all that with much more eloquent and compelling prose. You don’t even have time to read all those thousands of blogs, so why spend any more time on my most mediocre one!? As a human being, which I presume that you are (unless you are an artificial intelligence browsing through these words some time in near future, reading perhaps a million pages per second (in which case I trust you won’t mind too much having wasted this one millionth of a second to read this one; carry on, now)), you will have a very much restricted attention space, as well as a limited life-span. So why indeed should you waste your precious time with my bullshit?

In miniature form, the problematic has always been there; I am reminded of how the sociologist Randall Collins (1998) described the field of philosophical debates in his Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press):

 “Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain – something like a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting, ‘Listen to me!’ This is the intellectual attention space. …

           [To get others to listen, one] can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd…. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of argument. [But there is this thing that I call t]he law of small numbers[. It] says that the number of these successful knots is always [only] about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.

— Collins, p. 38

 

Not just philosophers and intellectuals and artists, but most human beings, social animals that we are, would like to share our opinions with others; and, alas, the attention space in any field, around any issue, is highly limited. There can only be a couple of superstars in any field of action (if there were more than a couple, they wouldn’t deserve the label “superstar,” now would they). In a broad field, where there might be hundreds of thousands of participants from all around the globe, there will be a wide variety of lesser stars and then mediocrities; and these could again be classified and ranked into many sublevels. The mediocrities, the nobodies of the field, are destined to disappear without almost anybody noticing. Well, their family and friends will notice, of course, and will mourn their loss; and to those folks, Jim-Bob will be “Jim-Bob, the philosopher,” because they remember Jim-Bob went into some fancy university, got his PhD, and even published an article or two in some philosophical journal. (Plus he could win any argument in the local tavern; any argument!) Indeed, but the rest of the world will not remember Jim-Bob, as a philosopher or as anything else. And now, with the internet, the scene has exploded: it is not just the academics (and there are more of those, too, than ever before – hundreds of thousands of them) and non-academic intellectuals like famous novelists, and journalists and politicians and celebrities, who will be trying to make their opinions heard: now there are several hundreds of millions of people shouting in the internet: “Listen to me, I have something to say!” We are attention-seekers; and we have opinions, of course we do. Perhaps you know what the character “Dirty” Harry Calahan, played by Clint Eastwood, said in the movie The Dead Pool [1988]: “opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.” So now there are hundreds of millions of these assholes gaping in the blogosphere, all calling for our attention.

So many assholes, so little time! As limited beings, we must wade through those a-holes, paying most of them only minimal if any attention, trying to find those few that deserve our consideration. Of course, who you are will give you some guidance and help you restrict your attention to some of the more promising a-holes. For example, we more-or-less scientifically minded, leftist-liberal atheists who vote for the Green party, we prefer certain kinds of – what we like to think are relatively well-argued and scientifically founded – a-holes that are best compatible with our leftist-liberal, secular and environmentalist worldviews. But even in that particular field there is so much competition that I find it hard to believe that my little a-hole will attract – or deserve – much attention.

Or, to borrow the ever so slightly more eloquent words (as translated by Charles Cotton) with which Michel de Montaigne, an early-modern age French philosopher addressed his reader in the foreword to his Essays in the late 16^th century:

“Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and humours …. Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

 — Montaigne, Essays

Too long; didn’t read? Well, long story short, Michel here mentions (with some considerable false modesty and a twinkle in his eye, of course) a couple of good reasons for publishing his Essays – reasons that might just be good enough for me too to publish a few blog posts. Surely my blog could get the attention of “my kinsfolk and friends” – some people who already know me, my family and friends and perhaps some other associates; and it might just mean leaving some sort of legacy behind – so that people can remember some of my “conditions and humors.”

What is more, one never knows whether such a legacy, eternalized here in the internet (at least until the great, knowledge-age-ending EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse), or some all infrastructure-destroying impact of a comet on earth), might one distant day be found by some chance someone – someone with a similar mindset, perhaps. Say, four hundred years from now, in the year 2416 …?

Of course, if these texts do indeed survive the next four hundred years, they might also be of interest to an historian, or to some cultural anthropologist studying the turn of the millennium, perhaps specifically the tiny speckle amongst world cultures that was once known as Finnish culture (which might at that point have been dead for a couple hundred years already).

In 2416, if humanity has survived (and not been reverted back to the pre-digitalization era), they will probably be utilizing some pretty awesomely powerful AI engines to browse through and analyze millions and millions of web pages from around this period in a matter of seconds; but let us assume that a human mind – whatever that is like in those days, probably quite a bit enhanced by AI implants and some cognitive software running in a quantum cloud and accessed directly by those people’s cyborg brains – will every now and then take special, personal interest in some of the pages the AI picks out, immerse itself with the text, perhaps be moved by some universal human theme or be amused by some funny cultural difference, just like we today might be moved by some universal human themes and amused by some cultural differences when we read Montaigne or other authors from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Are you picturing this – a scholar in 2416, coming across the humble blog posts of yours truly and finding there something interesting? I propose to call that 25^th century cultural anthropologist Chang (motivated by speculation that China might well be a dominating world power in those days). So, hello, Chang! Bless you for stopping by; hope you will find these silly scribblings useful to your scholarly purposes!