Oh, what a difference a year makes. And maybe that’s just it: maybe it’s circumstantial, maybe it’s related to the fact that a year ago I was there and now I am here, and everything, but also nothing, has changed.

But seriously, have you looked at the internet lately?

I know the internet is not just this Thing, this big mouth-breathing monster that sits in the corner and grunts occasionally and then looks back down at the keyboard. But indulge me for a moment. Pretend it is. And just look at the state of it! Greasy hair, stained t-shirt, dried spittle at the corner of a tea-stained mouth. It hasn’t been exercising enough; it hasn’t been realising its potential or even acknowledging it has worth.

Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I don’t write rants on Sundays. Sometimes I don’t write anything, all day, which is not good when that is basically what I am supposed to be doing all day, every day. But honestly, a lot of the time I can’t actually pinpoint what it is I’m thinking, or what it is exactly that’s annoying me, even when I know something is annoying me. There’s so much noise. It’s like that scene in Arcadia (which I know I reference in every other blog post), when Valentine Coverly says “There’s just too much bloody noise!” and you aren’t sure if he means there’s too much noise around his data, or too much noise in the room, in general.

I am not going to do that thing I hate and blame the Internet Monster, and say that the reason I sometimes can’t write or sometimes can’t identify what it is that’s annoying me is that the Internet Monster has been mouth-breathing in my ear all day and I’m just so…wait, what was I saying? Because I still really, really hate that. I am not going to blame one of the greatest (for better or worse) technological and possibly sociological phenomenons of our age for the fact that sometimes I sit down at my computer and instead of banging out another 2,000 words of my book I look at photos of expensive chairs and impossibly beautiful women in Barbour coats on Tumblr. Because if computers didn’t exist and I was chained to a desk writing my book in my own blood with a stick I would still find ways not to write it. I can promise you that.

But. Part of the reason I don’t write, or I don’t know what’s bothering me, or I can’t figure out what the fuck my book is supposed to be about, is because lately – in the last year, or two, maybe – I haven’t been exercising that part of my brain that ignores everybody. Everything I read or see or hear that involves anything or anyone else in some way influences what it is I think I should be doing. Which isn’t right. And because I read and see and hear a lot, my sense of what I should be doing has been completely diluted by this sense that I’m not doing what they’re doing, how can I be more like them?

I am envious or jealous almost all the time because of what other people are doing. I don’t actually know what other people are doing, of course. The lives I see online are like little icebergs, and I will never collide with most of them, so I will never know what lies beneath. But I can extrapolate from an offhand comment – “what a great day”, for instance – and, because I like to invent things, and in a perfect world I would be inventing them on paper for an adoring public, not in my head for the sake of destroying my own self-esteem, imagine that what this means is that the person who had a great day is, at 24, already a bestselling author with a Booker nomination and a big house.

I guess the thing is, there’s just so much. Of everything. I’m drowning in everything. And it isn’t that I can’t shut it off and it isn’t that the Internet Monster is destroying the world. It’s just that I’ve lost my bearings. I’m stuck in a bad maze. I’m tired of a lot of things, which is fine, but I need to know how to find the things that excite me, rather than just encountering, again and again, in different incarnations, the things I’m tired of.

There’s just so much funny, for instance. There’s so much funny that none of it is funny anymore. It’s too near the bone, or else it means nothing at all. If I read one more girl’s clever blog about her slightly zany life (and, looked at from the right angle, whose life isn’t slightly zany?) that overuses capital letters, sentence fragments and exclamation points to drive home just how FUNNY! It all is! I will probably cry. (And am I guilty of doing this? Yes. Of course I am, sometimes. I’m as susceptible as everyone else, and I know it: that’s the point.).

Meanwhile, on Twitter, that medium for even more transient expression, there are all these jokes! These one-liners that, taken out of context, are mean or meaningless or both. And all this talk about television! Increasingly I wonder if Twitter is actually just a way for people who watch a lot of TV to feel like they’re part of a community. And they can #xfactor to their hearts’ content, and Caitlin Moran can make as many quips about the contestants as she wants, and other people can retweet Caitlin Moran’s quips about the contestants as much as they like (this is not a criticism of Caitlin Moran, by the way: she is a tremendous writer, both funny and poignant, and I have a lot of respect for her). But it’s still a Sunday evening and they’re all still sitting at home alone watching television and talking about how bad it is – or, even more depressing, how good it is.

Am I jaded? Yes, I am, a bit. I’m tired of smug people telling us what they ate and wore and accomplished today. I’m tired of self-referential Techcrunch pieces, self-referential Guardian articles, self-referential tweets. I’m tired of reading blogs about how to be more productive (why do these blogs never suggest “not spending your entire morning reading blogs about productivity” as a tip for being more productive?). I’m tired of feeling perpetually as if I’m not keeping up, even when I know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, because no one could ever keep up, even if they tried.

But I’ll say again: our imaginary Internet Monster, slobbering and abused in the corner, is not the cause of my angst. You know what the cause of my angst is? My self. My negativity. It takes a certain amount of energy and imagination to sift (or, perhaps, see) through a billion photos of well-dressed people standing in the middle of the street and a bunch of blog posts about that really awkward thing I did yesterday or that really funny thing that happened to me involving a bookcase, a dildo and a dwarf, but it can be done. No one says that books should be abolished because there are some really bad authors out there (maybe some people do say that, but they’d be wrong). And no one is standing over me forcing me to spend a few hours every day looking at things that, fundamentally, are making me depressed. I’m doing that all on my own.

What is making me angsty, therefore, is not that there is so much shit: it is that I am allowing myself the luxury of getting down about all the shit, instead of ignoring all the shit. I don’t have to read the things I read, and, more importantly, I don’t have to react negatively to them.

I think maybe a year ago I was too excited about everything to ignore anything, if you see what I mean. I think a lot of us were. But now we have the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to choose what we engage with.

So welcome to the era of accountability: in which the Internet Monster stops doing the work for us, and we have to be discerning enough to discover and promote the content we actually care about, instead of being forever mired in the content we resent. No one said it would be easy.

❧

The other day, or maybe this morning, I sat down to work – not, as it happened, for a client, but for myself. A month in to my freelance life, I am finally able to give myself permission to call the act of sitting at my desk and looking out at my overgrown garden and typing (or not typing) things “work”, even though it feels more like “fun”, like “skiving,” even. I was eating toast, and it occurred to me that as long as I was eating toast, I was under no obligation to work. It was like when I would bring a sandwich up to my desk at the office and eat lunch over my laptop. I could still check emails and re-load websites and report bugs, but because I was on my lunch hour, it was not necessary to do these things. If my mind began to wander and I found myself adding a dozen books to my Amazon wishlist, that was okay.

So the other day, or this morning, eating my toast, I decided to browse the internet for awhile. That’s not true, of course: no one decides to “browse the internet”. What I decided to do was look at my Google Reader. Which inevitably led me to open five or six new tabs – things, I told myself, I was, or should be, interested in, essays about the decline of culture or the rise of intellectualism, sparse hipster prose bemoaning the state of politics, erudite descriptions of scenes from some cop drama or other. I kept chewing on my toast, but none of these things seemed like the sort of thing I wanted to read over breakfast; they were the sorts of things you had to concentrate on. I was eating toast; the whole point of eating toast was that for the period of eating it, I did not have to concentrate if I didn’t want to concentrate, and I didn’t want to concentrate. I hadn’t even had a second cup of coffee or a first cup of tea.

I looked at Twitter. Incidentally, I also finished my toast, but as I was now determined to find something lighthearted enough to be an appropriate accompaniment to toast, I decided that I was still not obliged to do any actual work, and that, in fact, the only thing I was obliged to do was to continue to take advantage of my lack of obligation.

On Twitter people were mostly saying “good morning”, as if announcing their presence validated their existence; or was it the other way round, was it that their existence validated the act of announcing their presence? But some people were also posting links to things. I have to click on links to things because I’m paranoid I might miss something. I hate being out of the loop, which is unfortunate because I’m nearly always out of the loop, mostly because I don’t know what loop, exactly, I want to be “in”. My attention is spread too thinly, in other words. Anyway, usually I’m not missing anything, but a few of the links were interesting enough, a few of them were, as it were, worth clicking. For instance, I found a photo essay on shipwrecks, with which I am visually fascinated. I have no compulsion whatsoever to find anything out about them, but I could look at photographs of them for hours, enjoying the sensation of vertigo I get when I see a dead ship still half-floating on the water, or “dash’d all to pieces” on the shore.

Having spent ten minutes or so considering how simultaneously beautiful and futile all human endeavors are (we build these, ships, these great big ships, and then we can’t even stop them running aground, perishing, rusting, disintegrating!), I felt appropriately morose. I decided I was ready to tackle some of the other open tabs, the longer essays, the things that might make me mad, or might at least make me think. One of them, as it turns out, was this piece by Dani Shapiro. As soon as I started reading it, I knew I would finish it. I must say, I’m very good at predicting whether or not I’m going to finish a piece of writing. And of course, as soon as I realised I was going to not only finish it but also enjoy it, I wanted to know how I had come across it. Had someone I know tweeted about it, or linked to it in a blog post? Had it been referenced elsewhere? Had I even meant to click on it? Maybe my hand had slipped and I had accidentally tapped a link I hadn’t even noticed. Discovering exactly how it had come to be open in my browser began to obsess me (though not enough to try to retrace my steps): what was the path between toast and this moment?

I came, eventually, to this:

And so I googled Beidermeier. The first thing I discovered is that I was spelling it incorrectly. The i comes before the e. Biedermeier. Next, I found myself on the website of an antiques dealer in Paris. Lovely stuff. Unaffordable. Which reminded me that I hadn’t paid the deposit for my son’s summer camp. I clicked away from the antiques dealer and onto the camp’s website. I filled out all the forms—this took about twenty minutes, and involved going through my iphoto folder to download a recent photograph of my son, which led me to relive this past year, our trips and dinner parties and weekend visitors, our bike rides and hikes and visits with his cousins—until I finally typed in the credit card number and enrolled him in camp for the month of July. Which led me to be worried about how we’re going to afford to send him to camp, to private school, hell, to college, even though he’s only in the sixth grade. I reflexively checked Twitter. I hardly even knew I was doing it. I had forgotten to respond to that person who DM’d me. And while I was on Twitter, I figured I might as well tweet.

That was exactly my path, too, I realized: that was exactly how I had come to be reading this essay. For a moment I despaired, though the essay is not despairing in tone: how could I ever write anything if I spend all my days as an amnesiac, wandering through the forest of curiosities, marveling at everything, discovering and rediscovering, but unable to remember what I had set out to do in the first place? If my sense of purpose morphed with every new sentence consumed or photograph viewed, how could I ever devote the proper amount of time to any one project?

I decided not to look at the rest of the open tabs, and not to make myself a cup of tea to justify another two-hour lacuna (tea, as opposed to coffee, signifies a break, a mental space in which, as with toast, you’re not obliged to do anything you don’t, on a whim, decide you want to do). I decided to write about my despair and my curiosity.

So I sat down and began to write about this. I wrote for some time – an hour, maybe, or two, or three. It hardly matters; what matters is that during that hour or three I did not click on anything else, I had no compulsion to tweet, or find out via Facebook which of my college acquaintances has recently got engaged, or look online for the right pair of black leather heeled ankle boots, or play with Google maps, planning out the perfect round-the-world route. And then, eventually, I had a small essay.

That is to say, I had, inadvertantly, without meaning to (in fact, meaning to do quite the opposite), done some work. The quality of work is irrelevant: that is the other thing I am teaching myself to do, along with calling it “work”. I am teaching myself not to care if, at the end of the day, all I have produced is a small essay that may or may not leave any lasting impact on anybody, even myself. And the way I do this – which may be different from the way you do this, or the way he does it, or she does it – is by treating each morning as a journey without map or meaning. There is no purpose, there is no right or wrong: there is only the possibility, if you don’t try nearly hard enough, of learning something, and then, eventually, of making something.

❧

1.

I keep thinking about all the time I spend online looking at things (photos, writings, memories, ideas, intimacies) that belong to other people, to people, more specifically, that I don’t know. Sometimes I have a connection with these people, but often I don’t. That word connection is interesting anyway. Sometimes it’s just a chain of seven or eight people. Where does “connection” end, nowadays? I’m connected in some way or other, if you look hard and creatively enough, to lots of people that I have really no actual connection with.

So what does it mean, to look impartially (or not impartially) upon something that means something to someone you’ve never met and maybe never will meet but means nothing to you, on a personal level at least, and feel something anyway?

(I mean very mundane, personal things here, by the way: photos from a trip to the coast, a snapshot of a lunch or a bedspread or an outfit, a tweet about a commute or a commentary about a cup of tea.)

2.

Maybe it doesn’t matter after all: it’s just stories, it’s all just stories, it’s all about the spaces in between a text and a reader, where there’s room to interpret and build.

The other day I had this thought, that the way I write and the way I think about story are completely different things. The story in my head is very messy, very alive. But the story on the page must be restrained, very disciplined and dignified, to allow for a reader. The best part of any piece of writing really, in my opinion, is the space in between: that is to say, the spaces the author leaves for a reader to contribute to the creation of a story. When I was little this is how I used to read: by putting down the book and adding to the story in my own head. What I enjoyed most was this process of silent contribution, of placing my own thoughts, my own interpretations, into the text. I would take my book outside with me and walk in circles around a pile of rocks left over from the construction of some bit of the house. It was not a very large pile, so the circles were small but I never got vertigo and every once in awhile I would open the book to a random page and sniff. If we hadn’t lived on a ranch, quite far removed from other people, people would probably have driven past and looked at me making circles and sniffing books and thought I was crazy. A crazy little girl with dusty scuffed shoes and too much time to think.

3.

Anyway other people have written much more elegantly than I ever could about interpretation and influence and intertextuality, but what I really feel is that where anything comes to life is the place where it overlaps with your own experience.

4.

It works best with intimate objects, when you feel you have a window into something. Maybe this is why I feel like I am always looking for the non-stories. A photograph from a war zone or a tweet about a celebrity encounter is too far removed from my own experience, too much like the fictions I already know. But to see someone else write about a trip to the farmer’s market, to see a snapshot of someone else’s shoelaces, makes me think about the stories (or the non-stories?) of how people are connected: how did I arrive at this moment, this image, this blog, this point of re-distributing or re-purposing content? It would be interesting to look at the story in great detail, the list of connections, the path I followed. Sometimes, of course, it’s very simple – this person, who I know (online or offline or both), recommend/linked to/mentioned this thing, and now here I am, arrived after following a direct path. But sometimes, oftentimes, it’s much more convoluted. And other connections start to appear, start to seep into the story. This is really the thing I like about the internet, maybe: the endless possibility for quiet human drama (where drama means only connection, in some small way, any way).

5.

Which is why to look at someone’s holiday snapshot, to see a photo (for example) of a boat bobbing on the water in Devon, is so interesting. I have never been to that town in Devon, I have never seen that boat, I do not know the person who took the photograph and posted it online, I don’t even know someone who knows that person (though it may be that I know someone who knows someone who knows that person). And so I am looking at a piece of fiction. I am allowed to be a part of the creation of that piece of fiction. The gap between my experience, my own self, and the creator of the content, the anonymous or nearly anonymous girl on the beach, is large enough to allow for an entire story to fit comfortably, to settle and grow.

❧

I don’t really know if I want to write about this.

Or maybe I know that I don’t really want to write about it, but I can’t help myself because I’m so self-absorbed (and because I want another excuse to think about Facebook! Because I’m under the age of 30 and therefore FACEBOOK IS THE ONLY THING THAT REALLY MATTERS, besides myself).

But here goes:

In March 3rd’s “Why Is This News?”, Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr address a recent study that shows that Facebook is helping to boost millennials’ self-esteem.

And yes, it’s a slightly ridiculous study and yes, there are probably better uses of the time and resources that went into conducting it (overthrowing corrupt governments, curing diseases, “helping organize protests for democracy”, which is obviously what all the hallowed entrepreneurs of the world are concerned with doing – solving “hard problems using technology” – though funnily enough, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur, too). But it strikes me that any interesting analysis in this segment has been sadly buried beneath the glib jokes about how unemployable and narcissistic are people born after 1980.

Which makes me wonder: do they think that nobody born after 1980 knows about TechCrunch? (I guess they do think this, because it isn’t FACEBOOK!). Or that our self-esteem is so high that we’ll just shrug off the accusation that we’re becoming “more insufferable” and “more entitled” with a LOL and a quick profile update?

Lacy does make a few attempts at balance – “obviously we’re not saying everyone in this generation is like this” – but the overwhelming impression is that she and Carr are just enjoying taking the piss (“certainly the press release as far as I can tell is spelled correctly and uses the correct grammar, so, you know, there’s definitely a non-millenial hand at work here,” Carr quips). And it’s possible that what actually annoys me is not at all what they’re saying, but the fact that I admire Lacy’s work, and in that weird and irrational way that you want to think that all the famous people you admire would like you, as a person, I like to think she would like me, and now I’m worried that she never could because I was born in 1987. Which is obviously both stupid and self-absorbed.

***

For me, though, the most interesting point is not that young people have artificially high self-esteem and think it’s their right to spend all day at work on Facebook. It’s actually one that Carr brings up towards the end of the dialogue: “The way you used to get self-esteem was by achieving something, like, you would be the fastest runner, or the best entrepreneur, or the, you know, cleverest mathematician. Now you just have to tell people, you have to be the best at telling people those things.”

I have rarely heard a truer thing said, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a generational issue. I’ve been told by people young and old that the best way to get ahead (whatever that means) nowadays is to shout about yourself. I’ve been told, in fact, that I need to spend more time shouting, and less time doing (I think the commonly used phrase is, “put yourself out there!”). If you want to be a writer, for instance, you have to aggressively market yourself. You have to be the best at telling people about yourself, not necessarily the best at doing what you do. Because there’s so much noise already. Which makes sense, I guess? IT’S SO LOUD OUT THERE SO I’M JUST GOING TO KEEP RAISING MY VOICE UNTIL SOMEONE HEARS ME!!!!!!!! And people do, amazingly, get heard above the din. So it works, in a way.

But the idea that achievement has been devalued is an interesting one, and it’s perhaps supported by Carr’s suggestion that nobody can find any good millennial employees (“Mike [Arrington] was saying…the struggle he’s having to find a new executive assistant…the floods of resumes that come in, and it’s all like not good candidates, sub-par candidates. My parents, you know, recruit for their business, and they can’t find…in this entire generation…”).

Carr and Lacy joke that it’s because millennials can’t spell their own names correctly, but I wonder if it’s actually because all achievements look the same on paper, and if some are artificial, they may as well all be.

Take FACEBOOK!, which is really just a form of social resume-building, a record of relationships, interactions and social circles (“sets”, to use the archaic but still accurate terminology of Charles Ryder). Those of us who were at university when FACEBOOK! emerged learned (along with how to discuss politics with a hangover and the best places on campus for a midday nap) how to claim social achievement without necessarily having to feel it. At first it was a novelty – you could literally see how many people you were connected to! (A number which was not always, by the way, a self-esteem boost, especially when you compared yourself to the blonde sorority girls whose friend count always seemed to exceed the 1,000 mark). But the word “friend” set us up for failure; not every 1,071 of the sorority girl’s friends were actually friends, just like not every achievement listed on a millennial’s resume actually means anything. Plenty of us have a university degree (or two, or three). Plenty of us made photocopies and coffee for congresspeople or CEOs. Plenty of us played sports or starred in plays or started our own bands or our own companies or our own revolutions. And now it’s mostly just noise.

And this is a problem. Because while it may, as Lacy suggests, actually help clear the field for those hard-working millenials who can spell (“if you’re one of the people…who’s still working really hard…what an advantage you have in this workforce,” Lacy says), it also indicates that of all the things we generally are, as a generation – selfish, narcissistic, Facebook-obsessed, insufferable – what’s impacted us the most is our skill at and susceptibility to advertising. We’ve actually been seduced by our own spin, even if no one else has.

***

All of which leads me to believe that we need to reframe the discussion about millenials. I actually wrote about this once before, in response to another Paul Carr piece. I didn’t publish what I wrote, mostly because my rage subsided so quickly that I could hardly muster the energy to finish the last sentence. Over the course of writing about Carr’s suggestion that millennials are “the most obnoxious, self-entitled, lazy and willfully ignorant generation ever to pollute the surface of the earth,” I discovered that I wasn’t actually angry about this assertion because it was unfair (or even particularly untrue): I was angry because the piece never reached its full potential. The really good stuff – a citation of a study that showed how “millennials as a whole ‘have unrealistic expectations and a strong resistance toward accepting negative feedback’”, for instance – was left largely unexplored, stifled by all the accusations and funny little quips.

So I guess what bothers me most is not what’s said about millennials – it’s what isn’t said, it’s what’s not said because everyone is too busy being so damn funny. Yes, let’s talk about the fact that achievement has been redefined. Let’s talk about the fact that Facebook has basically ruined any chance my generation ever had of being taken seriously, because even though we’re not the only ones who use Facebook anymore, we made it what it is. Let’s talk about the idea of constructing identities online. But let’s talk about it in a different way.

***

Anyway, as Lacy says, “part of this is tongue-in-cheek, but this actually does really concern me.” I’m off to go post a link to this on my Facebook page.

❧

1.

I’m trying to figure out why personal blogs, blogs about the boring and sometimes alarmingly intimate details of other people’s lives, are so interesting.

It’s sort of like a live version of an indie film where nothing happens but you get this delicious glimpse into what it’s like to be someone else. Books too are full of really mundane details; I see (personal) blogs the same way – like a chronicle of what it is to be human. That’s part of why it still hacks me off so much when people talk about the internet as a “dehumanizing” influence, something that distances us from ourselves, something that creates interaction that is “artificial”.

Every interaction is only as artificial as the one that came before it. Someone writing about their kid taking a poop or about falling unexpectedly in love is about as human as it gets.

But the thing that really makes blogs so special is that there is no necessary or predictable ending. The story is ongoing, protracted. The characters encounter change at the same pace the reader does, because the characters exist in the same space as the reader. Sometimes their lives even overlap – figuratively (hey, this person is feeling what I’m feeling right now!) or literally (hey, this person knows friends of mine, or, hey, this person is a friend of mine!). It’s a more visceral approach to reading, in a way.

2.

I know that literature is not ever only about the little things, but I do know that often what I’m attracted to are the details, not the plot twists. Last May I read one of the best books I’ve read in a long time – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. What I liked the most were the things that, on the surface, didn’t really mean anything, I mean, didn’t drive the plot forward – the fortune cookies that Tassie cracks open in a Chinese restaurant, the dress she starts to wear to impress a classmate. And as the book began to froth and buck in anticipation of its appallingly dramatic climax, I began to feel betrayed, as if I was being denied the opportunity to savor what really mattered.

3.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I read the blogs I do, the personal stuff: the blogs by people I know, or friends-of-friends, or friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends, and also the blogs by people I don’t know but that are written in a friendly style.

I find these more compelling than almost anything. Why do I care what someone I’ve never met wears every day, or what Heather Armstrong’s newly redecorated front room looks like? Superficially, I don’t. These things are basically meaningless to me; I have a hard enough time deciding what I should wear; I have my own family and my own life.

But as a voyeur, they mean everything. And isn’t this what the internet is all about – or, what I mean to say is, isn’t this what certain parts of the internet – Twitter, personal blogs, social networking – are all about? Being an observer of humans, a sort of online flâneur, strolling along the online equivalent of the Seine with the blogger’s equivalent of a tortoise, taking in the world?

So why do I care so much? I don’t care so much. At least, I don’t care any more than I care about bigger things (say, uprisings, elections, taxes, wars). And I don’t care any more than I care about my own small self, my own life. I just care differently. I care on the same level that I care about what Margaret Drabble’s fictional narrator thinks about her job or what she says to her newly married sister. I care because we are all human beings, because there are people out there like me (where “like me” can mean something as simple and generic as “from a similar background” or “also likes fart jokes”) who are documenting their own stories, in their own way, and this is fascinating.

4.

Also I like the ongoing story, the succession of curated moments: which is precisely what a novel or a film is, a succession of curated moments strung together in some meaningful way. This is why I am also not opposed to the idea that we present different versions of ourselves online. Because the very act of curating a life means something. Why do we choose the things we choose to share? Why do we present ourselves in whatever way we do, through whatever medium we choose?

5.

I saw something recently about Tumblr (which has been on my mind recently), about how David Karp set it up as “a reaction to other blogging tools” – as a sort of blogging platform for people who didn’t want to blog, in a conventional way (“I wanted something much more free-form, much less verbose,” he says).

A little later I read something by Mathew Ingram on GigaOM about how some people are saying “blogging is dead” (presumably in the same way that Camile Paglia proclaimed last September that sex is dead – that is to say, because it is a nice frame for cultural criticism because it sounds grand and means very little).

Ingram suggests that blogging isn’t dead, it’s just evolv(ed/ing). I suppose this is true; I suppose that the way we share things has changed, because we have more ways of sharing than ever before: we don’t just have blogs, we have different types of blogs – different ways to create and consume content – we have David Karp setting up a platform that allows you to simultaneously create and consume content, to curate in a totally new way.

“Personal publishing has arguably never been healthier” writes Ingram. Which is exactly right. Sometimes I worry about noise, about pollution, about all the beautiful phrases and ugly sentiments we are throwing into the ether. I worry about crowding, about waste, about how we can possibly ever sort “good” content from content that doesn’t necessarily need (or want!) an audience.

But then again to worry about this is to ignore the fundamental fact of “personal publishing”: that it is personal and it is publishing. I do not want to read everybody’s blog ever. I do not always want to know what you had for lunch or about the fight you had with your partner or about the fact that you are training for a marathon, but I find the fact that these things are there a great comfort. I don’t always care what people wear or how they decorate their rooms, but I care that I have the option to care.

So part of learning to live in a world where “personal publishing has arguably never been healthier” – part of learning to live in what I’ve seen called so often the “digital age” – is learning to accept, and to filter.

6.

In a lot ways what I read online is relatively random – I saw something in this person’s blog that appealed to me and so I read it. But that’s also how I read offline. I pick up a book from the shelf and sometimes it is something that I will keep coming back to and sometimes it is something that gets buried under the piles I make by the side of the bed of things I think I want to read but really actually don’t want to read.

And also the thing is this: I get invested. Ultimately it’s all selfish. I get invested in the ongoing stories about other people’s ongoing lives mostly because I see something – even just a glimmer – of my own life in them: by which I don’t mean my own life specifically (at least, not always), but simply my own life as a person. I mean that I see some element of humanness that touches in me the urge to consume stories and to create them. I mean that I care deeply about something really banal in someone else’s life because I care deeply about the banal things in my own life. Because this is what it is to be human: to ultimately be boring, to eat and shit and say stupid things sometimes and have thoughts that go nowhere and thoughts that change everything, to get dressed in the morning and drunk in the evening. To love. I could read a hundred blogs about love.

7.

Then there is the issue of how much is ever really shared on a blog. In a New York Times profile of Heather Armstrong (of Dooce fame), Lisa Belkin comes to the conclusion that Armstrong “will tell readers something is going on . . . but not what. She will let strangers feel as if they know what she is going through . . . but not completely.”

Belkin goes on to quote Armstrong’s husband:

“This is where Heather has become a master,’ Jon told me earlier when I asked him whether a blog like Heather’s was sustainable as children grow up and families tire of the magnifying lens. ‘She has the ability to take a single episode and turn it into an epic, and then, if you go word by word and ask, ‘What did she reveal?’ it’s really not very much. David Sedaris once said that his stories are ‘true enough.’ Blogs, the ones that last, are also ‘true enough.’”

So yes, this is true: we don’t know the people whose lives we examine. We don’t even know as much about their lives as we think we do. But true enough is also good enough. True enough leaves enough room for the necessary interpretation. In other words, we help build the narrative. We take the glimmers of information and hope that we absorb from other people’s blogs and make them mean something.

This would be harder if everything was true, everything exposed. If everything was exposed it would be easier to feel different than to feel similar, easier to feel alienated. In politics we’re always selectively building narratives – it’s what candidates run on, an idea – a value, maybe – that becomes a story that everyone can be invested in. The reason it works is because a good narrative is felt by many. A good narrative is inclusive, not necessarily specific.

8.

Something else in the New York Times piece, too, stands out. Belkin writes that,

The month Leta Armstrong was born, Technorati estimated that there were two million blogs on the Internet, a number that was doubling every five months. Of those, Armstrong’s was one of the few — one of the earliest — successful personal narratives…It was the start of an explosion, a meeting of 18th-century journaling, 19th-century magazine serials and the intimate universality of cyberspace. Click almost anywhere on the Internet on any random day and you will find yourself in the middle of someone’s story…Having a tale to tell is only the first step, of course.

So having a tale to tell is the first step. But is it? What does that mean? What is a “tale”, when it’s all ongoing anyway?

9.

This is a question I’ve been asking myself in a different context for several years now. I’ve been trying to write this book, you see, and the thing that’s always stopping me, even when I get halfway through, or, once nearly all the way through! writing it, is what I call “structure” – how do I frame it? How do I organise it? But what I really mean when I say I don’t know how to structure it (I see now) is this: I don’t know where to draw the invisible lines into which the story fits.

I’m not very good at this, because I’m a blogger, and because I’m a person who consumes stories in this ongoing format so frequently. I read blogs more often than I read books: it’s a fact. Not because my enjoyment of books is in any way diminished by my enjoyment of blogs, but because the blog is easier, requires less of me. I only have to feel what one piece of the story makes me feel; I don’t need to worry about the implications of the next piece of story yet, because the next piece hasn’t been written (because of course the next piece hasn’t been lived).

So I’ve been trying to write this book for so long without realising that I have the power to decide where to end it (and where to start it). Because I am just so used to story imitating life – to story being told at the same speed as life, I should say.

So how do I choose that moment? How do I decide, “this is where I want to stop telling this particular story”, when I’m still living it and still writing it?

10.

I guess the thing is that I just do decide. Because if I don’t I will never tell the story at all; and because this is all part of the process of curation and creation.

❧