A blog was always going to be a bit of an interesting option for me, the semi- computer literate, social networking nobody that until recently hadn’t even read a blog. But like all young hopefuls, I just turned to Google for answers and guidance. I read all sorts of advice and top-10-tips for starting blogs, and when they bellowed loudly that you must have a topic, you must know what you are talking about, I just shrugged my shoulders and thought, easy, I’ll be talking about me.
But I was wrong. It’s not easy. Because the world of blog is not all it seems.
Its not self indulgent self publishing. It’s reading and research and lots of fluffing and puffing and ass kissing and prancing, and its serious social networking and self promotion.
And sure, maybe its only those things if you have a certain agenda, like having someone who is not your boyfriend read your blog. But being young and impressionable, I tend to get caught up in agendas that are not necessarily mine. And in being conflicted in nature, I tend to say agendas are not mine when perhaps, on some level, there are.
And so I began to fret and feel the pressure of it all, because this is one of my finely honed responses to life – feel the weight of it.
I found myself checking and rechecking, like someone with a compulsive twitch, to see if anyone, anywhere, had left any comments. And it soon became clear that somewhere along the way my desire to document the life and times of me would only have any value if it was being consumed by others.
So when my boyfriend explained that the whole premise is built on this ‘networking’ idea and that I should comment on other people’s blogs, I busily set off into the blogsphere.
I followed links here there and everywhere and felt like I had walked the virtual world fifty times over. I had 20 screens open, watery eyes, and a kind of shell shocked exhaustion that could be liken to flying straight into Mexico for 2 days, before hitting the Amazon, flying out to New York, then rural American, then back to suburban Australia. You would no sooner adjust to the tone and language and nuances of one country before you clicked yourself away into another dimension. The world is a big place, and on the internet you can travel around it far, far too quickly.
The cacophony of differing voices swallows you whole, and your spinning around trying to find an exit, trying to turn the volume down. Or at least find someone you actually want to genuinely talk to.
But like a young kid trying to learn the ropes of a new school playground, I hung back and watched. (Oh, and I joined twitter. I have one follower).
Some people wrote sickeningly sycophantic fan mail comments, some stayed in character constantly, never failing to crack a witticism, others seemed genuinely interested and full of praise – all of them were diligent. And not just the commentators. The bloggers were quick to reply back to each and every comment with humble thanks and praise in return. When I mentioned on one site that this was my first visit, I soon found a personal email in my inbox thanking me for stopping by.
I even somewhat serendipitously, but not for good, stumbled on a blog entry from a ‘popular’ blogger about the evolution and agonies of this blogging world. A more eloquent account from the perspective of someone who knows what they are talking about on the crisis of writing for yourself but putting it in a public domain, riding the treacherous wave of rising and falling self esteem, obsessing over stats and traffic, and oh-my-god-the-stress-and-weight-of-it-all, and shit that was great timing reading that one. She had 15543 billion comments, yet she still found time to respond to my ‘holy shit that’s encouraging’ remarks with a little motherly reassurance.
It was like customer service in overdrive. I am shit at customer service. I have been fired from countless jobs, walked out on just as many and had letters of complaint written about me. How was I ever going to get my head around this virtual world of marketing, client based relations and social networking?!
So after a long and detailed week long conversation with myself, I decided, unconvincingly and after much deliberation, that, its not supposed to matter, and I should get back to the task at hand of documenting myself.
But not for the general public, or my unfound virtual friends, but for the future anthropologist that unearths cyberspace and seeks to find answers to our failed existence. Because its not all just ass-wiping mums, wisecracking wise guys, and overly earnest care bears. There are anxiety ridden, sometimes insecure and mostly neurotic, uncertain people out there too, and they, more than anyone, are more likely to hold the key to our downfall.
So I figure I best get back to it so that they might know of my view from the gutter, cuz like that old wino said, not all of us are looking at the stars, some of us are staring at all that pigeon shit and worrying what the hell to do about it.
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