Shots Across The Bow

Blow it out your A**!

A while back, there was an artist who created a buzz in the art world by his, shall we say, rather unusual painting style. His name was Keith Boadwee, and he got his 15 minutes by loading up his butt with a paint enema and blowing it out onto a canvas. (Why am I telling you this? Patience, Iago, patience.) This combination of performance and conceptual art excited the avant garde art crowd to no end, proving once and for all that art, no matter how full of crap, will sell if packaged correctly. (In this case shoved right up the old wazzoo!)

The problem is that it isn't art.

Now some will call me parochial and small minded, but art should be intentional. It doesn't have to be beautiful, and it doesn't have to have some deep philosophical or political message, but it should be on purpose, and should provoke or convey some emotion. Some guy farting paint on a canvas just doesn't cut it. It's too random, no different than inking the paws of my cat and letting her walk across a canvas.

In a way though, what we bloggers do is not very different from what Boadwee did. With certain notable exceptions, bloggers react in real time, from the gut. We read some bit of news or commentary, and instantly jot down our thoughts, analysis, or opinions, hit a button, and BANG! we share them with the world, with out really taking the time to organize our thoughts into some logical order. Heck, many of us don't even take the time to spell-check. (Note to Ben and Mena: You want me to pay money for an MT upgrade? Include a spell checker with a customizable word list, and I'll send you a check tomorrow.)

Now there are exceptions of course. Some of us carefully research our posts, build a case, and craft each sentence with care, determined to let the air out of some pompous windbag. Others of us can execute beautifully written prose on the fly, composing, editing, revising and posting the final version in less time than it takes me to decide on a title. But what most of us do compares to real writers about as favorably as Enema Boy does to Jackson Pollack. Both create abstract paintings, but with Pollack, you see a sense of purpose. The seeming randomness is actually controlled chaos, building to convey or provoke a visceral response. Enema Boy's paintings are colorful crap smeared on a canvas.

Am I saying that bloggers are full of crap?

Yes , partially, but that's not a bad thing.

According to Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crap, so why should the blogosphere be any different? So yes, the blogosphere is full of crap, but we also have to look at Hailey's Corollary, codified about 20 years ago when a young lady friend of mine was going through a very rough time, and needed some encouragement. Hailey's Corollary says that while life is full of crap, crap makes good fertilizer; you should grow something.

Bloggers are creating an extraordinarily fertile garden, where information transfer and personal self expression are cross-pollinating, creating an entirely new medium. Right now, nobody knows how blogs will affect traditional media, only that they have already made an impact, not only in how stories are covered, but in which stories are covered. To return to the Fumento flap as an example, a minor dustup with a "nobody" whose readers number around 100 has now become fodder for the entire blogosphere, seen by tens of thousands of people, simply because the story resonated with a few people, and was picked up and amplified by some of the big players.

It certainly was an unpleasant surprise for Mr. Fumento, but a nice illustration of the way the blogosphere works.

In that fertile environment, even the smallest kernel of an idea has the chance to grow. Blogs are very egalitarian; today's buzz could come from one of the big timers, or just as easily from some obscure guy posting about what pissed him off this morning. If the story resonates, it will spread throughout the sphere, until it is picked up by one of the big boys, which gives the little guy a huge boost.

We all get excited when one of the big guns takes notice of us, and our traffic spikes, but what are we really getting excited about? Take last week for example, where I caught an SDB-lanche from my dust-up with Fumento. My traffic skyrocketed, and I enjoyed the ride, but that enjoyment was tempered by the knowledge that the links that brought in the traffic weren't for me; the people that followed the links weren't looking for my writing; they were eager to see a puffed up science writer show his ass in public.

And they got what they were looking for.

But when this story dies, how many of those 4000 or so readers will still be here? 10? 20 maybe? Who knows?

What I do know is that those 10 or 20 repeat readers are more important than the short term flood of visitors. They are the ones who've looked through my archives and liked what they saw enough to come back, to bookmark or even put up a permanent link. They are the ones I get excited about.

On the other hand, I also got an Insta-lanch last week (Yep, it was a good week!) when the professor linked to my post on the power grid, a link which did bring people here specifically for something I wrote. That was an affirmation I could enjoy without reservation.

So while 90% of what I produce may truly be crap, I keep writing to get to that other 10% that's worthwhile. Who knows; with enough practice, I might be able to knock that 90% down to 85%.

Posted by Rich at August 23, 2003 12:57 PM | TrackBack