I’ve always meant to write a “Why I Blog” post and now that I’m listening to The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen this seems like a great time to do it. I googled Keen and many of the reviewers I read just dismissed him out of hand. Keen is essentially calling all us bloggers monkeys with typewriters. He’s not kind to amateur writing and talks as if the Internet is one giant slush pile that is assaulting the true quality writing that comes from traditional publishing.
Keen does make some good points. One point he champions over and over is culture is better served by the expression of the elite few rather than hearing from the democratic roar of everyone. Keen also suggests the idea that television would produce better shows if there were fewer channels and he also believes the emergence of YouTube dilutes what the average viewer watches down to crapola.
Now I don’t disagree with him. If all the video we watched came from twelve networks then I’d say the average quality of TV would be pretty damn great. In fact, for TV viewing I’d prefer having only twelve networks. I actually miss the days when there were only CBS, NBC and ABC. During those years I felt I had a stronger bond with my friends and family because we all watched the same shows. Three is too few but five hundred is too many. The same math does not apply to the Internet.
Keen believes the time people waste on reading blogs could be better spent on reading professional edited magazines and books. He also believes that the web undermines the economy of traditional publishing. I think in both cases this is true. However, he misses the point on the real value of blogging.
Blogs and blogging actually have many purposes. Few bloggers see themselves competing with Time, Harper’s or Scientific American. Most blogging is social and their posts would be competition with casual conversation rather than paid writers. Some bloggers are just writing public diaries and many others are just following the herd hoping to meet other like-minded creatures.
I do believe there is a small percentage of bloggers who would like to be real writers and use blogging as a form of practice. However, I can’t imagine them wanting to kill off commercial writing because they all secretly hoped to get published and paid too. Many bloggers dream they can make money blogging but Andrew Keen shoots down this idea by interviewing owners of high traffic sites. I also talked about these get-rich-quick bloggers in my post “Has Google Become King of the Spammers?” I don’t equate blogging with these people.
All of this doesn’t discredit Keen’s attack that the web is hurting professional publishing by distracting readers from buying books and magazines. The world of money centers around attracting eyeballs and minds. There is always competition for people’s attention. Even before the Internet parents and educators wanted to recapture the attention of their children and complained the choice kids faced was between quality and drivel. Back then the pundits worried that television was empty calories and books were primo brain food for kiddies. Now Keen is protecting TV from the Internet.
Is Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur just a descendent of Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham? Both men could be right in their campaign to defend culture but they could also be wrong in that they missed the qualities of a new art form. What does blogging bring to our world that didn’t exist before?
Instead of being passive individuals that consume predigested information produced by the elite, people on the net embrace being active through self-expression. The Internet represents a do-it-yourself revolution. Sure, by the yardstick Keen measures blogging does not measure up – yet. The value is not in what’s being expressed but in the effort people make to express themselves. Blogging represent amateur essayists. I remember back in school when the teacher assigned writing a 500 word essay it would bring about groans. Now millions want to write such essays every day. Is that a bad thing?
Personal computing has always represented a strange kind of revolution and transformation. I helped hundreds of people learn to use a PC back in the 1980s and I always felt sorry for them. Suddenly jobs for secretaries and professors required that they learn all kinds of new skills that was never part of their jobs before. The average worker now has to learn skills once left to specialists like typesetters, graphic layout artists and computer operators. Now the net is expecting little Jacob and Emily to write and edit, and for some to be sound engineers and video production technicians. Is that so bad? Most of the people producing the content for the web are rank amateurs and Keen doesn’t like that. To Keen everyone is practicing the piano and it’s painful to hear.
Personally I think Keen is worrying too much over nothing. He screams the sky is falling by predicting there will be five hundred million blogs by 2010. It’s my theory that blogging will fall out of favor before 1/12 of the human race takes to the blogosphere. There’s a good chance that socializing on the net might be a fad. I say this because I see an awful lot of dead and neglected sites. It takes a lot of work to maintain and grow a site. Blogging isn’t for the lazy. Nor does it have wide appeal.
I do not have any friends my own age that blog. In fact, I have a very hard time getting my friends to even read my posts. Even when I tell my wife that I’m writing about my girlfriends she can’t find motivation to read my writing because the world of blogs isn’t real to her. Now blogging might be an age related activity, or it might be a person-type activity. Most people I know define socializing as meeting other people face-to-face. Blogging is a kind of hive mind socializing that allows certain kinds of people to enjoy communicating in a non-face-to-face mode, and I think that greatly limits the audience.
Which brings me back to why I blog. I always wanted to be a writer because I loved to read. I’ve taken a number of fiction writing courses, including many hours in a MFA program. I also attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in 2002. It’s a semi-serious hobby that I’ve tried to work at more since I turned 50. Blogging is writing and publishing without an editor. I consider it practice writing. Forcing myself to write 3-4 essays a week is a kind of discipline. And it’s very educational.
Blogging has taught me that I have to entertain readers and that’s very hard to do. When you’re young and want to be a writer you assume you’ll hammer out a novel and people will want to read it. Well, they don’t. I use blogging stats as a tool to measure successful stories, and so far I have not been very successful at all. My best day was hitting 149 readers. And even that number is deceptive because most people come to this site by accident. WordPress shows me the search terms used and it’s obvious in most cases what people want isn’t what I’m offering them.
My two most successful essays “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” and “Did AAPR Rip Off My Old Mother?” were flukes dealing with topics outside my normal range of interests. That’s actually a great lesson of journalism – write about what people want to know and not what I want to naval gaze. Of course then I’d always be writing about Brittany Spears or how to create web sites that brings hordes to Adsense links. I have a lot of room to learn and practice. There are zillions of great essays to study and my hope is to find many models to work from. Eventually I’ll write posts that succeed in the way I want.
I also blog to make friends. My wife had to take a job out of town and I spend a lot of time in my house alone. This has forced me to socialize more with face-to-face friends, but I also find blogging to generate good company. I love the passion that my fellow bloggers show for their subject matter. I admire many for their skills and I study them hoping to improve myself. I see blogging as a self-improvement hobby.
I have also discovered a by-product of blogging that is very beneficial to me. In recent years my memory has gotten more sieve like. Since I’ve started blogging I’ve slowly changed and I’m now retrieving words better. I worried I was on the road to Alzheimer-land. Blogging is good for my mind and helps me learn discipline. Keen is right – I don’t write as well as a professional writer. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to improve. Blogging challenges me to improve every day. I read other blogs and admire what they have done and that pushes me to do better. I read professional magazines and study their quality and that makes me want to write better too. Keen missed this whole angle that deals with self-improvement.
Finally, blogging makes the world smaller. There is a hive mind quality about the Internet. I think of the Internet as a sixth sense and it disturbs me that my friends only live in the world of five senses. This is both metaphorical and real. I think Andrew Keen devalues this new kind of neural network of bits and bytes in which we’re all a synapse. Keen really hates Wikipedia and fails to credit the hive mind for creating something both useful and wonderful.
I think Keen has some valid criticisms in The Cult of the Amateur and I’m going to return to them time and again. I think blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and all the other products of the net can be improved. Many magnitudes of evolution will happen on the net in the next ten years. Reading Andrew Keen won’t save the old ways of things, but his criticisms will help us to grow stronger. Keen fails to see the competition of the fittest angle is this brouhaha. I think traditional publishing will survive and thrive and the net will only get more powerful too.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 
I started blogging in 2003, reluctantly, when a friend suggested it to me. I didn’t like the idea, because I’m a firm believer that all writers need editors, and I think peer review is a valuable thing.
But then I started and found that it was good exercise. I always promise myself that I’ll stop when I struggle to find something to say. At my peak, I was posting three or four entries per day on about three different blogs – but that was when I was in a boring office job.
Since a career change, I’ve spend less time on my computer and post only three or four times per week, but I’m still enjoying it. I don’t care how many people read it, really – and I’ve actually deleted posts that were getting too much search traffic!
I’m 45 and, like you, I don’t know anyone (personally) my own age who blogs or reads blogs. It’s a strange thing: millions of bloggers, but you don’t tend to meet many in the flesh.
I like what you had to say about why you personally blog. All very valid reasons that in many ways synch up with the majority of bloggers out there, in my opinion. When I read criticisms like Keen’s it makes me want to cringe. It all appears to amount to the same elitist, fear-based thinking that all other ‘professional’ blog critics have in common. They don’t like the unwashed cretins treading on their previously hallowed reviewer ground and the fact that our voices are in some ways drowning out theirs causes them to write garbage like this.
Does it surprise me that he has some valid points? Not really, he is bound to. But if the larger premise upon which he is basing his criticism is wrong, doesn’t that sort of tarnish all the areas in which he may have gotten something right?
To say that blogging, the internet, etc. is hurting the arts is ludicrous to say the least. I have discovered so many talented, creative, outstanding artists solely because of the internet and I champion their work any time I get the chance. It is even more crazy to champion the idea that the amount of time spent reading blogs is cutting down on the amount of time one spends reading…as if there is a 1:1 correlation between the two. I might spend my non blog time working, playing computer games, taking a walk with my dog, staring at mindless television, sleeping, etc…all activities with varying degrees of value. The fact of the matter is that since I started blogging 3 years ago my book purchasing has gone up several hundred percent over what it was before blogging…and that is all about my time spent on the internet and the many books I read about and want to buy because of the internet. My reading output has tripled during the years I have blogged. And I am just one example of many. The internet not only spawns interests in literature because everyone is talking about the books they are reading, but it also spurns people on to spend more time reading simply because of the peer pressure to keep up with those in your circle of blog friends.
I have also purchased more artists’ work in my years blogging and being on the internet than in all the years combined before I started blogging.
I consider myself a reasonable, marginally intelligent, gentle soul but reading stuff like what Keen has to say (and I admit that I am basing this solely on blurbs about his work, some from the man himself) makes me want to act like a monkey with a typewriter and beat his ass with it. I cannot believe people get paid money to spout off their superior dogma like that. Praise be to free enterprise!
By the way, I think it would be safe to bet that over 90% of his book’s sales will be attributed to the internet and blogging, etc. Otherwise relatively few people would ever hear about what he has to say. Sort of ironic, isn’t it?