Conversation

Synthesis wrote piece that I read a few days back on “self” and “other” as related to blogging, suggesting that there is an “other” that we write to while blogging. I didn’t respond at the time, but too many chips have fallen into place to ignore it any longer.

I searched in vain for an angry entry that I thought I wrote about a statement by Doc Searls, but maybe I never wrote it. Maybe I just thought it. I’ve written so much in the past year that it becomes hard to separate what I have written with what I have thought.

As I recall, the statement was in an article about blogging, where Searls said that when he blogs he doesn’t write for an audience, and that is what separates his blog from his professional writing. Bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. All writing is done for an audience, even if it’s just for yourself. Any writer should know that, intuitively, otherwise there would be no compulsion to write.

I visted Doc Searls weblog again for the first time in a long time. Not to my taste, really. But judging from what I read today, he has surely revised that stance, because now he is speaking of his weblog as a conversation. Hmm, I think I’ve read that somewhere before.

I suppose what draws me into weblogs more than anything else is personality. If I want reporting, I’ll read a newspaper. If I want links, I’ll visit the appropriate directory or design site to see what’s new. However, the function of weblogs in bringing out what is important that needs to be reported, or what’s interesting that is worth visiting, is directly tied to the personality of the blog in question. That’s what’s really amazing about it. It saves a lot of time in finding what is most significant to you on the web, if you can locate people who share common interests. But more than that, an entirely new form of long distance relationship can be created by this common search for information. You actually start to care about people on the other side of the screen.

Most people on the so-called “top tier” of bloggers don’t interest me much. What some people revel in as “great writing” doesn’t do much for me either. Most of it is purely adjectival obfuscation. It’s a mask. We all wear them, though. And it isn’t just a phenomenon of blogging, it’s a part of human communication that is accentuated and spun out of control through the technology of writing.

To get to the really interesting stuff, as a photographer with a great deal of experience with people who say cheese, I can tell you that I don’t believe that they “smile for the camera”. They smile for the photographer, not the technology. He is a clearly present audience, and all photographs, smiled for or not, usually represent a sort of transaction between photographer and subject. I don’t believe that people give much thought to “smiling for eternity,” when there is a live human being in front of them. It’s an audience, so they amplify their mask. It takes a lot of rapport and patience to let the guard slip down enough to make an honest photograph, a transaction that cuts beneath the surface of the mask. For many photographers, the mask is more interesting than the person underneath, so they don’t bother with this at all.

One of the best treatments I’ve read of the audience question is “The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction” by Walter Ong. Here’s the part that cuts to the quick:

Masks are inevitable in all human communication, even oral. Role playing is both different from actuality and an entry into actuality: play and actuality (the world of “work”) are dialectically related to one another. From the very beginning, an infant becomes an actual speaker by playing at being a speaker, much as a person who cannot swim, after developing some ancillary skills, one day plays at swimming and finds that he is swimming in truth. But oral communication, which is built into existential actuality more directly than written, has within it a momentum that works for the removal of masks.

Lovers try to strip off all masks. And in all communication, insofar as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love. Those who have loved many years may reach a point where almost all masks are gone. But never all. The lover’s plight is tied to the fact that every one of us puts on a mask to address himself, too.

Such masks to relate ourselves to ourselves we also try to put aside, and with wisdom and grace we to some extent succeed in casting them off. When the last mask comes off, sainthood is achieved, and the vision of God. But this can only be with death.

Ong astutely deduces that because writing is further removed from actuality, the removal of masks is more difficult. The writers mask is a very stubborn thing, and in some cases I feel that blogging really aggravates this. About pages with significant real information about the blogger are conspicuously absent on most pages. I suspect that this is because people feel that dropping their masks, which they long to do, is best pursued in anonymity.

However, I personally think this is counterproductive. The lack of disclosure on most blogs removes them from any concept of authenticity, tying the mask on more firmly than ever. Conversation requires trust. It’s easier to listen, when you know who you’re listening to. So much of blog culture seems like a zipless fuck, you get off in a moment, and move on to another anonymous partner, rather than thinking anything about love.

Regardless of what some might think, all attempts at communication are about something, whether we acknowledge it or not.