Philip Baruth on Blogging
By Philip Baruth
If you like blogs — like reading them, sharing them, maybe writing them — then you and I have something fairly important in common, because the 21st century is rapidly separating the world into Those Who Blog and Those Who’d Really Rather Not.
For blog-friendly types — those who love the immediacy, the sizzling pace of news and events, the snarkiness and the wit — it’s almost impossible to understand the half of the world who have decided to sit out this particular technological dance. But their complaints usually boil down to one basic turn-off: Bloggers, in their eyes, are under-informed and self-absorbed, all about themselves, 24/7/52.
Critics see blogs as disastrously extended monologues, in other words, and bloggers as boors who pay absolutely no attention to the presence or the needs of the viewer.
And nothing could be further from the truth.
If anything, bloggers are hyper-aware of their audiences — if they weren’t, they’d keep an old-school diary or journal, and tuck it into the very private drawer of their nightstand before drifting off to sleep. But by definition, when someone begins keeping a globally accessible weblog, they do so because they want to share, to be read, to be understood, to spark discussion -- to perform, in a word. Every post is a scene, really. And since bloggers can’t use facial expressions and gestures, they become masters of tone — sarcasm being the tone of choice.
As often as not, bloggers speak directly to their readers; they invent linguistic sound effects to make reading more like listening (such as the now-standard evil laugh: “Bwahahahaa!”) And that, of course, is what makes it all so much fun: Bloggers put on a show, and they use every shred of technical expertise they have to make sure it’s involving and entertaining.
So why does the negative stereotype about bloggers persist? Because at least 25 percent of the time, bloggers are guilty not of ignoring their audience, but of misunderstanding it. And these misunderstandings come in three basic shapes and sizes:
1) My Audience Is Cool With Whatever I Do, Because It Is I Who Have Done It
Because blogs are supposed to involve breaking rules and upsetting traditional forms, some bloggers fall into the mindset that whatever they post — and however they post it — their audience will not only accept it, but enjoy it. Insult your audience? Fine, they’ll take it as bold and out-of-the-box. Dash off only a few lines every week, full of misspellings and grammatical errors? Cool, because readers understand that days are short and postmodern life is full. My words will be more valuable, because they’re fewer and further in between.
And sure, you can hang on to your close friends and family with that sort of behavior — after all, they’ll accept it from you in real life, so why wouldn’t they live with the digital equivalent on your blog? But those who don’t know you — readers you recruit from the various neighborhoods of the Internet -- won’t continue to watch a show with bad production values.
The more consistent you make those production values (better image production, better blog software, better frequency, better grammar and spelling) the more comfortable readers will be with recommending the site to friends.
2) My Blog is About Whatever I Say It’s About
As with the category above, this involves a basic misunderstanding about what audiences want and don’t want in a blog. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it contains everything, somewhere. People flit here and there, sampling, collecting. But the catch is that readers don’t want everything from everybody; they want consistency, more or less, within any given blog.
One of my pet peeves is going to my favorite political blogs, only to find that they’re cat-blogging that day, or discussing “The Lord of the Rings.” Don’t get me wrong -- I love cats, and I respect hobbits. But a blog that veers crazily from topic to topic gives me the desktop version of motion sickness, and I think many readers feel the same.
So stay within two or three broad, hopefully interconnected subject areas (pop culture, celebrities, movies), and exit those areas rarely. Readers have a say in your subject matter, that is to say. And if you choose to deny them that say, they will vote with their mouses, and you’ll never even see them leave.
3) I Can Still Do Anything I Want If I Am a Celebrity, Like Madonna
Actually, this one isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s true. Pretty self-explanatory.