Alright, enough of this namby-pamby affect. "Blunt and brash" is what the descriptor says, and blunt and brash is what the blogosphere is going to get. Stay tuned for LAFFS! THRILLS! CHILLS! SPILLS! OTHER THINGS CAPITALISED UNNECESSARILY. etc.
Just to get it out of the way, I want to note right here and right now that the navel-gazing-what-is-my-audience-thinking-about-and-
how-can-I-second-guess-them-into-thinking-what-I-want-them-to-think quality of blogging has already worn a little thin. And it's only the second post! So to avoid further postmodern-esque distractions on this store, below are the Top Five Things I Already Despise About Blogging:
5. Worrying about worrying that I sound too self-reflexive. Deconstruct that at your leisure. Trust me, by the time you've done so I'll have developed another ulcer.
4. Desperately trying to gauge whether my writing style is pithy, cynical, verbose and trendy enough to land me a book deal. This is a problem seemingly common to young literary types with few prospects and fewer business smarts.
3. Re-reading things that I've already written, and realising that I am subtly comparing them against articles from the latest issue of The Walrus (the result is not flattering).
2. Contemplating the scorn that will rain like a plague of toads on my head from friends and acquaintances, accusing me (quite correctly) of catching the blogging bug secondhand from Simon G. Frank and his musings about sharkfin collars.
1. A lack of spell check. This is really something that prompts screaming horros. Horors. Horrors.
It occurs to me, in re-reading my typo-ridden, unflattering and unsaleable effort thus far (wasn't that self-reflexive?) that blogging has got to be the most individualised and oddly non-communal form of written communication ever invented. Surely someone else has noticed this? Jotting down whatever sprang to mind and assuming it would be gobbled up by the masses used to be the domain of a few rich industrialists and L. Ron Hubbard, but now everyone's doing it. Seriously though, the mediating presence of an anonymous box through which one filters all this junk (mentally if in no other way) is vaguely terrifying - just one more step in the forced march towards an atomised, dissociated and technology-dependent "public" sphere. Isn't that cheery?
All this being said, I will attempt to reign in my pessimism and provide equal parts information and entertainment here at The Stark Contrast. There will be some opinions. There will be some reviews of things. There will be some pictures, maybe. I will occasionally (for my own contrarian purposes) lampoon and dispute the assertions of my colleague down the way at Exquisite Vanity. But most of the time, it will just be me yakking. And despite the techonological gloss, that's really nothing new, is it?
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2 comments:
I feel so influential. how many other blogs have you started!? do they still exist?
I tell you Simon, if you'd concentrated more on public speaking in high school, you would have been a public figure of note by now.
No, I think most of my former blogs are defunct. This is a good thing. They had garish colour schemes.
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