The urge to blog lives in a strange place. One speaks to an imagined audience. It is not enough to imagine an audience, though. It's more than writing into a booklet, "Dear Diary, …" – and yet we do it even if there are no comments. Sure, I never had a lot of comments. But I think I'm just as happy getting the occasional email or reply on the fediverse. The thought of somebody reading the words is terrifying. And once I got that first comment, once I started linking the blog from my profiles, putting it out there for others to find, inviting people to read and implicitly, to judge… I started discovered that the blog was something I feared. The blog is a thrill. It makes me nervous. The heart beats. The heart bleeds.
Back when the blog had comments, I used to be anxious about comments. First, there's a comment. Is it good or bad? Do I read it now? Do I risk a look? But then the imagined audience is still there and now it's worse. How will I react as I am being watched? Blogging turns into a performance where I feel like I'm demonstrating my moral character. I am not a racist! I am not a white supremacist! I am not a homophobe! Or am I? All the discourse online has made me self-conscious. I really don't want to be what I fear I might be without knowing it. I keep thinking of the idea that people who aren't very observant being unable to perceive their own faults. The requirements go up when I learn more.
The effect of all that anxiety, for me, is that I take things seriously. Words are serious. I try to put my word where my heart is. I try to weight them carefully. I weigh my heart. Writing is morally intense. It doesn't matter how long or how short the page, how trivial or how controversial the topic.
And above all of it hangs the grey sky of unspoken words, of thoughts unexamined and all that maladjustment, all the failures, all the judgements. How often have I found myself falling short of my own measure.
To blog is to wrestle with that. I imagine an audience that is strangely interested in all the things I am interested in. I write for them, for me, for my future self that looks back, the heart full of regret. I struggle for virtue and I put it into words for you and me, the imagined reader and myself. As proof. "I struggled!" I struggle. I keep on struggling to discover what is right and to do what is right.
Blogging is like writing secret confessions. I write about the things that I think I did well because I did them wrong and then I changed my mind. I write about the things I know because I did not know them before. And who cares about those laborious system administration blog posts where I struggle with this or that ephemeral problem. All these issues are lost pages. Nobody cares. People find their answers on Stack Overflow or Reddit or some other centralized platform where middlemen gamify the experience so that we can help each other while on the thread-mill for their pockets. And who cares about those blog posts about growing old or playing games? People read them and move on. Like I do, when I'm reading online. Even if I am moved, I will move on. And there are so many posts to read, the folders on my disk with saved articles and snippets are more like compost heaps, where layer upon layer of good stuff gets dropped, never to see the light of day again.
Perhaps it sparked a thought somewhere, and perhaps that spark starts a fire, somewhere, much later. There is practically no connection and that is fine. The world moves and humanity is moved like a dreamer, one thought knows not the next, and we all partake in that eternal digestion of the sleepless mind. Our books, our journals, our blogs, our posts, they all participate. Perhaps we fall for those waves of outrage and the galaxy brain has a seizure as we all throw our weight around in unison, crushing innocent lives, leaving those we hurt behind, forgetting them as quickly as we forget about the outrage.
Or perhaps blogging is leaving a trail of blazing sparks, each one sparking a fire in the next generation. Spending time reading blogs and posts on social media has certainly changed me.
Perhaps I would have grown older differently without reading blogs and blogging. And this is why I cannot stop blogging. To blog in that half-shadow where perhaps our thoughts are read and perhaps they are not, where every text lights up and shines and drops and sinks onto that great pile where thousands of text are rotting, that is to participate in the galaxy brain that is our world. Some of us can vote and some of us can talk. Some of us can fight and some of us will weep. I try to blog.
I try to blog to prove to myself that it was a struggle, that I tried to think long and hard about things and that I tried to do the right thing. I keep failing and so I must keep blogging.
#Blogs
p1k3 wrote back in 2022:
Writing about writing. Programming about programming. Meetings about meetings. The mind reflecting on its own function. … Writing about writing might not have quite the same potential for nested, generative dysfunction, but it often produces artifacts just as unintelligible. – meta meta
That quote seemed very appropriate for one of the two threads in my posts. The other thread is about the audience and I got a comment on that, too, by the same author:
Not that I have much to add here, but I do relate to this one. The ongoing tension of these feelings contrasted with the sense that (as I'm sure I've said many times before) existing in public seems almost entirely unsupportable to me now. And yet: Nothing else has quite the same power as writing for this audience you can never be sure of. The one that might not even exist, but if it does might be all kinds of things.
The pain of existing in public is a great way to put it.
I think the point of blogging is for there to be a tiny, non-threatening audience. And really, who is going to read my blog? Internet stranger-friends, mutuals on fedi, those kinds of people. Maybe my parents. (Hi mom!) I can always anonymoblog somewhere else if I'm feeling anxious. Because writing in a paper notebook I don't feel judged. Surely there's a similar place, online. The key is to find that happy state where the imagined audience adds a little zest but not the Twitter wolves or Hacker News, or whatever the particular blogging nightmare might be.
For me, this imagined audience is more important than getting it right. Which is why I write my blog posts with the wiki spirit. All these sites are pretty similar, in essence. Blog, wiki, digital garden, Zettelkasten, there's not enough difference to draw lines. It's all a question of intent, of culture, of belonging. The blog spirit is to write pages over time, and they disappear into the archive. The digital garden spirit is to write unfinished articles and papers, to be refined or not. The Zettelkasten spirit is to follow the trail of thoughts you thought and add new branches, small notes with new thoughts leading to more thoughts on new notes. And the wiki spirit is to write and edit online, to hit the Save button and then it's live. There is no editor, there is no draft. Wiki is like brutalism in content management. I can see the page sources and the end result is obvious and full of that old web power. It's not an app. The software has no idea of process. The wiki spirit is to open that window, write the text and hit save. And then I read it again, and edit it. And tomorrow, I read it again, and edit it. And next week, perhaps, I read it again, and edit it.
I no longer live in the Wiki Now. The pages are intended for future readers but they are not timeless. I add timestamps all over the place. The blog spirit is strong. The pages do disappear into the great compost of thoughts. The archive gobbles them up. I do go back but I don't rewrite the pages completely. I'm more likely to simply add a timestamp and some thoughts like I did on this page.
I do remove stuff I stumble across that I don't like at all. I do leave some bad things in there to remind me of bad decisions made, of bad opinions held.
What I want to say, most of all, is that blog posts aren't gems. They are not precious books. They are not newspaper articles. They are not job applications. And if I don't like it tomorrow, I edit it. I revise it. Or I write a new page saying how I learned something, or regret something, or I add something. I add stuff to the bottom of pages or I add new pages. What I don't do is polish the old posts. There will be more great posts in the future. The important part is the writing.
The work of creation in the age of AI
Meaning without an audience:
If I am writing an essay or diary entry to myself, the goal is … generally to clarify my own thoughts, to identify flaws in my thinking, or to distil the logic and motivations behind my ideas. I might have a more emotional goal - I might want to vent to myself or to express a feeling. I might want to improve my emotional regulation, feel better about life, or change those feelings somehow.
And then with an audience:
… once I decided I might actually want to post it, I changed it in important ways. I included a lot more explanation of things that were clear in my head but I thought would be non-obvious to others (and, in so doing, often I clarified them for myself too!). I fiddled with the structure and the argument flow, took some things out, put others in.
I got an email from @bouncepaw@merveilles.town with a link to a reply. Thanks!
This is how it starts:
This article gets better every time I open it because Alex adds something to it.
I wrote about my propensity to “add” to pages up above (I’m doing it again!) and perhaps this would be a good place to talk about the two “views” for this site: blog & wiki.
A blog is organized by the timeline. The Home page lists all the pages in the order of their creation.
A wiki is organized by Recent Changes. The Changes page lists all the pages recently edited (unless I unset a checkbox).
So this site has both natures. And both views have a feed: blog feed & wiki feed.
I think you need quite some wiki-affinity to subscribe to the wiki feed. But it’s there for you.
You may be wondering where blogs come from and why you would do a blog. If so, keep reading! – doing a blog