Oo is zis Jack Hughes?

If you have a LiveJournal, you’re a blogger. It’s short for “web logger”, you see. The Register writes that most bloggers are teenage girls. “Teenage girls of all ages”, they add, pointing to examples of grown men throwing tantrums, dieting, experimenting with alcohol, and, for all I know, giggling and going gooey over that bloke from Alias.

The Register is a tabloid, and as such they love to build things up, buttercup baby, just to knock them down. Blogs never deliver what they say they will, the Register says, pointing to the exciteable speculation of the professional bloggers, who apparently think they’re the vanguard of a revolution in communication in which the centralised corporate meeja will be the first against the wall.

This is all pretty reasonable. The number of people on the Internet is very much larger than the number of people who care enough to read any given web log, and the number of people on the Internet is very much smaller than the number of people. So the revolution will not be blogged, fair enough. But then it all gets a bit nasty.

…blogging is a solitary activity that requires the blogger to spend less time reading a book, taking the dog for the walk, meeting friends in the pub, seeing a movie, or reading to the kids. The reason that 99.93 per cent of the world doesn’t blog, and never will, is because people make simple information choices in what they choose to ingest and produce, and most of this will be either personal and private, or truly social.

Maybe blogs are a way of keeping the truly antisocial out of harm’s way. So if you know a middle-aged sociopath, for heaven’s sake, point him to a computer and show him how to start a weblog.

At least it will keep him off the streets.

This is going away from the worthy task of pricking the pretensions of those blogging advocates and getting close to the old Saturday Night Live sketch about how some people need to “get a life”. The Register’s problem is that it fails to differentiate between people trying to get attention for their revolution and friends who are just quietly doing their thing. No-one thinks any step away from talking face to face is an absolute improvement. But given the constraints of distance and free time, alternatives like the telephone, email, instant messenger, and even a LiveJournal might be the next best thing. Every time some new way of taking that step turns up, people regard it as slightly odd. Back in 1994, it used to be that knowing email addresses off by heart was “sad”, but knowing telephone numbers wasn’t.

Letters, phone calls, email, Drogon, and this blog thingy are useful as long as there are friends using them. It’s not a revolution, it’s more of the same. Blog like no-one’s watching, because to a first approximation, you’re right.

5 Comments on "Oo is zis Jack Hughes?"


  1. I think that the friendship aspect of LiveJournal/blogging/whatever is one of the reasons people keep a journal. Fr’instance, it’ll be a good way to keep in touch with Jacqui when she moves to the other place.

    But for me, it’s more about ranting a bit, practising my writing, utilising the fact that I’m stuck in front of a computer all day and want to use that to my advantage. I quite genuinely don’t care if no-one does read what I’m writing. And if I thought anyone other than my close friends were looking at my journal I would probably stop doing it.

    Then again, it’s always nice when someone makes a comment…as long as it’s ego-boosting stuff!

    Reply

    1. Engineering paranoia: if you really don’t want anyone other than friends to read it, make your posts friends-only. Remember Murphy’s Law.

      I’m not sure quite why I’m posting. I think it’s that LiveJournal is a bit like that SixDegrees thing which everyone got into a few years back and then got bored with, but it actually does something useful.

      Reply

      1. if you really don’t want anyone other than friends to read it, make your posts friends-only.

        That would make a whole two people!

        Reply

  2. Hello Paul! Nice to see you! I didn’t know you had a livejournal!
    Anyway, you keep sticking up for blogging. As Terrie says it is a very good way to keep in touch with friends. And the people who wrote the article don’t seem to have considered that to write a journal, online or otherwise, you have to do something else to write it about as well. It’s just not possible to make livejournal your whole life, cos you run out of stuff to write (though it may be tempting to try, in the excitment of finding this new medium of communication). There are possibly “truely antisocial” people out there who write blogs only about their other online activities, but there are plenty of normal people too.

    Reply

    1. I’ve had a LiveJournal for a little while, as you can probably tell from the backlog of posts. Mainly got it to be able to read a friend’s “friends only” posts.

      Nice to see you too, anyway. I’ll stick you on my friends list. Feel free to reciprocate or not depending on how much really secret stuff you put in “friends only” (as in, if you put loads in there, you should definitely add me).

      I think the people the Register complains about are probably not the LJers but the people who endlessly discuss each other’s opinions (as posted on their weblogs). Still, it was a good rant anyway.

      Reply

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