Rambling: Neurons and Cheerleaders

I started this blog with fine intentions, posted a few times, then dropped it on the floor. And it's not because I ran out of black and white pictures of cats. I think I have the same disease that I complain about: The focus on moneymaking in blogging. I'm focused on it in the negative, ranting and gnashing about people who blog for the hope of a payday. I have plenty to say about that, but on this blog I don't want to rant about payday blogging, I want to ignore it.

So I'm making a resolution: I'll post here at least once a month. Even at the risk of sounding silly. Even at the risk of veering wildly off topic. And this time, I'm going to post about resolutions. Well, sort of.

The New Year's resolution posts rolled around this month, making me think of the way that people use their blogs to support their goals--whims, and hobbies, and self improvement, and crazy ideas.

I think that blogs serve this purpose particularly well. Forums do, too, but forums seem to have the most value when a number of people are offering their separate views on a subject. A blog is a reversal of this--it allows a single person to give their own thoughts center stage, viewed in sequence without interruption. They can tell their audience all about wearing the same dress for a year. (The Little Brown Dress Project, sadly offline.) Cooking every recipe from The Art of French Cooking. (You know that one.) Reading a hundred books in a year. (All sorts of people.) Breaking a habit. Recovering from a toxic parent. Learning to cook. Restoring a house. Grieving a death. They can have continued thoughts and inside jokes, and the context is right there in the blog.

Scientists and studies and, well, all sorts of people, say that simply writing about an experience can be therapeutic, that it changes our response to stress at a neurological level. Of course, you can put feelings into words by journaling privately, without ever exposing those words to others. But I believe, based on no evidence other than my own experience, that it's different when others will read that writing. Words are for communication, after all; are they really the same thing when you know that no one but yourself will ever receive that communication? Aren't your thoughts sharper, your phrases clearer, when you really do have to transfer your thoughts to another person?

All of this is just about the outgoing communication, but of course there's also the response. The value of getting support from groups, from Weight Watchers to grief support groups to book clubs and quilting bees, is well known. A blog offers the possibility of supporters, cheerleaders, and fellow enthusiasts or sufferers. That community thing. I think that the gentle pressure of an audience can push a person to make progress when they might otherwise abandon a goal.

As I re-read the above, there's a strong flavor of stating the obvious. It feels rather like those blog posts that assure the reader that "Eggs are a useful food," or "Weeding is important to a garden." I seem to have said, "Blogs are good for sharing your thoughts." Well, duh.

But, so be it; time to poke writer's block in the eye and post.

Hey, writer's block. Now, that could be a post...

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: A foolish consistency. Oh, and love.

I'm inconsistent.

I rant and rhapsodize about the value of creativity for the love of it, and the wonderful things that happen when any person can make their creative work freely available to the world. But I also appreciate (for example) Cook's Illustrated, and their ability to make a business out of selling the same glazed carrot recipe a dozen different ways. OK, they sell thousands of other recipes, but it seems like those glazed carrots are around every corner.

Aren't these two positions inconsistent? Well, yes. But no. See, I don't really care whether you put your heart and soul into your very best work and give it away for free, or put your heart and soul into your very best work and sell it for top-gouge prices. I care about the heart and soul part.

Those things involve focus on the work--the article, book, picture, perfume, song, movie, dress, or ravioli. Not on the advertisers that might wish to be associated with it. Not on the number of eyes that might be tricked into glancing at the logos and exclamation points and 1-800 numbers that are dotted around it. But on the work itself.

The amateur can be focused on the work alone. The professionals who sell their work directly to an audience have to defer to the taste of that audience, but they are nevertheless focused on cultivating a cash-waving frenzy of greed in their customers. And that greed is about the work. Both generally care about making me as the reader (watcher, listener, eater, whatever) delighted or fascinated or horrified. A heart-and-soul reaction.

Works that exist to be decorated with ads, on the other hand, too often have no ambition beyond attracting more people than the work presented by the next magazine, channel, or website. As a group, they just need to be more engaging than doing nothing.

So that explains--or at least rationalizes--why I can wholeheartedly support the work of the amateur and of the professional who charges for his work. I'm not in the "information wants to be free" camp, I'm just greedy for good stuff to read or watch or listen to, and it increasingly seems to me that the good stuff is hampered, not nurtured, by advertising-dependent schemes.

Does it have to be that way? No. Newspapers and magazines have been partly supported by advertising for a very long time, and they haven't all descended to mediocrity. But lately it seems that a lot more of them have. And the average ad-motivated website falls even lower than the average mediocre magazine--in the competition with doing nothing, many of them lose.

Maybe it's a matter of policy. When the idea of a boundary between advertising and editorial is mentioned, I don't know that people actually giggle, but I do think that it's not the sacred trust that I fondly imagine it once was.

Or maybe it's about increasing dependence on advertisers. I read in A List Apart that these days eighty percent of the revenue for some periodicals comes from advertising. In theory, good work should attract a larger audience for ads, just as in the past it attracted more subscription dollars. But I suspect that there's a difference in focus. When periodicals are cheap or free, the reader doesn't have to do much choosing; he can sleepily page through a dozen magazines instead of eagerly awaiting one. Again, the work only has to be better than its absence.

The love is lost. Work created with little or no hope of compensation is loved by its creator. Expensive work chased by cash-waving hordes is loved by its consumer. Work created for the purpose of drawing in ad dollars and consumer eyes doesn't need to be loved by anyone. And it so often shows it.

Image: By ThatPeskyCommoner. Wikimedia Commons.

Link: Why book bloggers are critical to literary criticism, from the Guardian

Again, the question of the amateur versus the professional drives a controversy, this one in the world of books.

The chair of the judges for this year's Man Booker Prize complains that book bloggers will harm literature by writing inferior reviews and encouraging the public to buy all the wrong books.  Interestingly, he seems to be assuming, essentially without  question, that those uninformed book bloggers will encourage the public to buy "readable" books, which he seems to equate with books of limited artistic value.

But does the average paid and traditionally published book reviewer really focus entirely on artistic and literary merit? And does the average home blogger focus entirely on readability, on a good pulpy page-turner? If I were to judge from perfume bloggers, I'd assume the opposite--perfumes on the artistic edge seem to get more exposure from the amateur perfume blogger than from almost anyone else. Of course, the perfume world, unlike the literary world, has traditionally suffered from a lack of independent criticism. But all the same, I don't assume that the amateur will always seek the sweet, obvious, and exciting.

This article in the Guardian responds with a defense of book bloggers, one sufficiently eloquent that no comment immediately comes to my mind, so I just encourage you to go read it.

(Side note one: This all makes me think of the recent post and discussion about "wearable" perfumes, which included a certain amount of commentary on "drinkable" wines.)

(Side note two: When I use the term "amateur" in this blog, I mean a person who follows  a pursuit primarily reasons other than financial compensation. That person may be a beginner, or they may have more skill than the average paid profession.)

Image: By Raider of Gin. Wikimedia Commons.

Short Thought: Amateurs and the truth about onions

Caramelizing onions takes a long time.

In "Why do recipe writers lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?" on Slate, the author explains that caramelized onions (deep-brown slow-cooked onions) need about an hour of cooking time, but that many recipes insist that they can be finished in ten or twenty minutes.

According to the article, this discrepancy comes from the pressure for quick recipes. If that hour were added to a recipe's prep time, the recipe-reading public would flee to someone else's recipe, and therefore someone else's book or website, bedecked with someone else's ads. (OK, he didn't say "bedecked." No one says "bedecked". I'm paraphrasing here.)

Yesterday, I was thinking about the value of amateur communication, and this came to mind. Some people object to amateurs, arguing that the information provided by professionals is more accurate and responsible. But professionals face a variety of pressures that amateurs can blissfully ignore. An amateur cooking blogger can tell the ugly truth about caramelizing onions.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Discussion Out There: Controversies

Once in a while a controversy comes along that has people talking about blogging in a particularly interesting way. Whenever that happens, I always wish that I had a logical place to track and discuss the development. That's one of the reasons for this blog.

So, what kinds of controversy? Well, I'm collecting a basketful of past ones and presenting them below. Someday I may write a proper post about these, or at least a proper listing of links. But today, it's just one link per, of the many very good ones that were posted for each controversy.

There was the controversy about perfume bloggers who went ahead and blogged without, in the opinion of some, sufficient expertise. Tangled with the suggestion that there were just too many perfume bloggers anyway. Part II of a rant from MuseinWoodenShoes offered a dandy analysis and many links, including a link to Part I.

In 2010, a garden blogger complained about people who have "ugly gardens" giving vegetable gardeners a bad name. An uprising of garden bloggers resulted; this post on GardenBloggers.com presented links to a great deal of that discussion, and a detailed discussion of its own. The discussion wasn't about blogging, but I found it fascinating to see how the blogging world so quickly responded to the accusation, blogger after blogger pointing to other bloggers talking about the issue. And the discussion had a lot of parallels to the above discussion about perfume bloggers--thoughts about the conflict between the expert versus the joyous amateur were very similar.

Also in 2010, the FTC decided to crack down on all of us ethics-impaired bloggers, since obviously other forms of media like, oh, fashion magazines, would never dream of allowing the slightest conflict of interest between advertising and editorial. (Ahem.) The Perfume Posse article "Swag Wank", by March, is a fine and entertaining example of the many discussions of the topic.

In 2011, there was the shocking discovery that some bloggers blog for free! (OK, sorry, I'll cut down on the sarcasm.) This was sparked by the rebellion when the Huffington Post collected a big bag of money for a site that contained content created for free by a herd of bloggers. I  actually did discuss this (with limited sympathy for those bloggers), so I'm going to point to my own post, though no doubt there are many better ones.

Image: By Olivier Aumage. Wikimedia Commons.

So... why?

I love blogging.

I'm frustrated by most of the online resources for bloggers. Most of them seem to be dominated by bloggers who blog purely for money. And many of those are bloggers who blog about blogging, purely for money. A fair percentage of them are bloggers who blog about blogging about blogging purely for money.

I persist in believing that blogging is a large enough subject to merit fascinating discussions that have nothing to do with clickthrough percentages and SEO. I want to talk about blogging as a mode of communication, shared culture, shared friendships and triumphs and failures and philosophies and, well, like that.

I don't know if that conversation exists or could exist. I don't know if a blog is the best place to try to have that conversation--it seems logical that a forum is a better place, but I've seen what happens to forums that don't establish critical mass. They die. And a forum with no posts for the past six months is sadder than a blog with no comments for the same period. So, a blog it is.

And it is, yes, a very plain blog. A very standard-template Blogger blog. No technical touches, no design touches, really, no touches at all. It's not about that part of blogging. But I hope that it will interest a few people all the same.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.