One, Two, Three, What Are We Blogging For?

My friend Daniel has derided my every social media effort from the beginning with a malicious glee that only your best friends can pull off. 

Well, as much as it pains me to admit this (and, believe me, it pains me a lot), I think he may have been right about blogging.

That is to say, he scoffed at the pointlessness of the entire exercise.  I've poured hundreds of thousands of words into this exercise over the last five years, convinced that I was building an online presence, or a brand, or something.  Now I think it's pointless.  I'm not going to stop blogging, but I'm going to more fully embrace the pointlessness. 

Initially, I thought I would attract readers with my brilliant pop cultural commentary, and they'd then buy my books.  Didn't happen, in large part because my pop cultural commentary, while unquestionably brilliant, was unfocused. 

So then I thought I'd focus on writing and writing-type issues, since that might help me reach the other bloggers and the other writers and the people who write about books.  But my audience didn't really grow. This is in part because, with my self-imposed restraints on subject matter, I was blogging less often. And partly because you can blog to inform or you can blog to entertain, but you can't really expect your deep thoughts on anything to gain traction unless you phrase them provocatively.

And then I spectacularly pissed off the right people and got tons of attention.  (I probably could have done this earlier by linking to them and ridiculing them in this space, which would get them to click through and see me ridiculing them, etcetera.) It would be very easy for me to continue doing this.  Baiting people by tweaking their dogmas is absurdly easy and kind of perversely fun.  But it's pointless.  We all go back to our separate corners of the internet and talk about how we're right and everybody else is wrong, and since the people who hang out in the same corners of the internet as us tend to be people we agree with, we wind up getting lots of confirmation of whatever we already thought. We can then use this as ammunition to go back and yell at each other.  And so on and so on. It's all very talk radio, very Crossfire, very pointless.

"Trolls" are widely derided throughout the internet--they're people who say outrageous crap in hopes of provoking an extreme reaction out of people.  I don't really get why they're widely derided, though, because most of us who spew a lot of words onto the internet are really little better.  Maybe we do it with a little more panache than the average youtube commenter, but many bloggers are pretty much doing the same thing.  And, as I've seen, keep at it long enough and it will eventually work!  Say whatever you want about me, just make sure the link isn't broken!Then I'll get my page views up!

(Aside: though I do regret the shitstorm I caused, I haven't taken the entry down because, what the hell, I'm not gonna pretend I didn't say that stuff.  And also, if I hadn't gotten all that attention, I might never have been accused of "mansplaining," which really tickles me.  I kind of imagine it in the Desi Arnaz voice: "Luuuucy!  You got some mansplainin' to do!")

So I'm not going to intentionally bait people to try to get page views.  Because that seems to be a currency you can't really exhcange for anything at all. (I will probably continue to unintentionally piss people off because I can't seem to help it, but that's not going to be my purpose.)

Instead, I'm just gonna write about whatever stupid shit is on my mind.  Well, no, I'm not going to write about sex, but all the other shit, horror movies, beer, video games, parenting, bike commuting, whatever.  I'm not going to do this because I'm hoping to grow or engage my book audience or "grow my platform" or whatever. I'm gonna blog because I like the sound of my own voice. So, yeah, Sokatch, it's pointless and narcissistic and I don't give a shit.

Maybe if you like the sound of my voice too, you'll hang around.  Or maybe you've got better things to do.  Like buying my books and telling everyone how awesome they are.