An echo chamber, and no one's listening
It finally feels like summer in Boston. The air actually feels thick and moist, which drives New Englanders crazy but pleasantly reminds me of the dog days of July in North Carolina. At some point the humidity begins to enshroud you, an enveloping claustrophobic hug. The proper response to such weather is to slow down, feel the heat settling over you as you blissfully do nothing. I have been doing a lot of nothing recently, at least outside of work hours.
Which means that my posts to this blog have been few and far between. And frankly it’s hard to get excited to write knowing that only a couple dozen people a week will read my work. I love to write for its own sake, but if that’s all I hope to do I could just write in my journal. No, I had some naïve hope that some of the thoughts here would stat a little conversation.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Internet, and the glorious explosion of content on the Web. I am a techno-optimist at heart, and I have to believe that this great increase in the number of authors in the world must be good for humanity, and will be as monumental for our history as the printing press. As I discussed in an earlier post, bloggers are as a community good at widely-disseminating publicly-available information, excellent at expressing our opinions about that information, and only so-so at investigative reporting to uncover new information.
Fro the reader’s perspective, however, the explosion of information on blogs seems a bit problematic. The vast majority of blogs are rarely read, for the simple reason that there is almost more content than there is people to read it. These are written mostly because their authors get joy out of writing. A very small minority of blogs become super famous, some by virtue of their name (think of the Huffington Post) and some by virtue of a particular piece that catches everyone’s excitement, the proverbial 15 minutes of fame. I wish I believed that this selection process brings the most brilliant opinions or writing up (certainly not mine) to the top, but I don’t. What wins on the web is a snazzy picture or a snappy tagline, dripping with invective.
I’ve now had the odd experience of having several friends tell me my essays are rather “serious”, and I think they meant that pejoratively. I’ve always tried to write essays like those I like to read- Mario Vargas Llosa, Gore Vidal, V.S. Naipaul, Michel de Montaigne. But the problem (apart from my lack of sufficient rhetorical chops) is that anything that ponderous and slow seems moribund on the web, anachronistic. I suspect if I were reading my own writings on the web, I would click away to another website before I reached the end of my own piece.
