The practice of blogging has fascinated me for years now, but I’ve always been resistant to engaging directly with it. If you accept Neil Postman’s assertion that with each new technology comes both gains and losses, and not always in equal measure, then choosing to use or not use a new device or technological form becomes a kind of moral calculus: am I gaining more than I’m losing by using it? Given that this choice is put before us almost incessantly, it’s often seemed wiser to me, or at least simpler, to skip the math and just abstain.
But Postman also phrased this another way: what problem is the new technology a solution to? In the case of blogging, the problem seems to be the limitations of existent forms of writing. My critical writing has generally taken two forms: finished essays and articles, some self-initiated (and self-presented) but mostly assignments or commissions; and personal notes, furrowed away in notebooks, that rarely see the light of day. The latter are usually written in personalised shorthand, not intended or required to be understood by anyone else; the former generally come to fruition largely thanks to their deadline, which after painstaking wordplucking, they usually only miss by a couple of days.
Between these two poles, a lot of what goes around my head gets left out. Of course, some of that comes out in my films–but those endeavours are lengthy and painstaking to an extent that makes the essays feel like quick fixes. Many other thoughts, or impulses towards thought, just circle my brain a few times and die, usually for lack of attention. This is partly because I don’t have the time to think them through and to write them out—but, more exactly, it’s because the forms of articulation that I have at my disposal can’t think them through quickly enough, or persistently enough: essays are too labour-intensive (if I decided to write an essay on every film I had ideas about or every philosophical question that occurred to me…well, there goes my lifetime) and notes are too breezy to facilitate focused attention (hence the failure of my various short-lived attempts to keep an ongoing logbook of cultural intake).
In this sense, blogging is a potential solution here: informal enough to be taken lightly, but structured enough and public enough to ensure a certain intellectual focus and, hopefully, rigour—with the added potential of contributing to a larger discussion or exchange, if my thoughts happen to interest anybody else. In short, it’s a good way to write about things I don’t have time to write essays about.
Of course Postman’s more generous rephrasing of this issue had a corollary: what problems is the new technology a source of? In the case of blogging, some problematic aspects are…
1) Its diaristic form, often devolving into on the one hand, a mundane forum for personal trivia and news, and on the other, critical thoughts that are too random or rushed to be of much real use—and emanating from both devolutions, the worrying implication (for a sometime essentialist like me) that anything is worth writing about, and worth sharing with the world.
2) It’s function within a wider ”blogospheric” community, which for me swings back and forth between being on the one hand a wonderful way for likeminded people to exchange ideas and on the other hand, yet another way in which people can disconnect, distract, escape and talk about whatever obsession they’ve chosen to cultivate to stave off actual direct engagement in the world.
But given that both filmmaking and traditional writing have their fair share of (somewhat comparable) limitations, as well as unhealthy side effects, why not throw one more questionable enterprise into the mix? So let’s gloss over the fact that Postman also described technology as a “Faustian bargain”, and draw attention instead to the more amusing fact that all these Postmanian references come not from an essay, but from a YouTube clip.
But let’s also say, to defend against these negative tendencies of blogging, that certain principles will be adhered to on these pages:
1) No useless information: No personal trivia; no news, or even critical commentary, that is well covered in other arenas; no writing for writing’s sake.
2) No linking to useless information. Fun as hyperlinking is, any item that isn’t truly worth the time it takes to read it should be quarantined, not linked.
3) Most importantly, and no doubt most elusively: A conscious effort to cultivate threads, themes, anything to battle against the (one more Postman quote for the road) “and now…this” tendency of blogging.
In short, blogging as a form of growing rather than collecting: a developer rather than a scrapbook.
Here goes.
[...] my very first post on this blog, I declared my intention to use “blogging as a form of growing rather than [...]