Well today I was off from work and since I had the delight of being awake since 7:30 with the phone call, neighbor construction, dog bark trifecta, I guess it's the perfect setting to get inspired or something. Part of what I did during the day was a blog run which has been pretty hard to get to for the last couple of weeks. Hell even now on a free day, I didn'n't nearly catch up with everyone I intended to catch up with. Reading paragraph after paragraph and post after post, it doesn't necessarilly dawn on me, but I'm reminded that as people who regularly write in one or more blogs, we are in fact scrap booking our thoughts onto virtual space. Any and every quirky little thing that comes into our brain needs to be posted and the need to be loved, hated or found intelligent, funny or amusing is there for all of us.
Even though we might deny it, we all want to take over the world with our little blogs that could. Every single comment is a reason to smile because we were able to connect with someone else, be it from another city, another town, another state, another country or another hemisphere. We all look forward to shared inspiration and while some people insist on updating their facebook status fifty times a day or twittering like there's no tomorrow, we of the blogging kind (yes including those that more than occassionally twitter) are brought together by comments, posts, thumbs up, diggs etc. We are forming a subculture that is probably being studied right now and will be reported and analyzed in text books in the next 3 years, if not less.
We offer opinions about music, movies, cars, current events, food, products, technology, and entertainment on all levels. Our own slice of life is the product we want to sell and though it might seem like a couple of trifle clicks to huge companies looking to be in the know, the fact that twenty or thirty people can relate to a message you have share is an endearingly powerful and addictive drug. To know that you made someone in Germany or India laugh, or that you made a New Zealand gangster ponder the existential relevance of Coca Cola spiked with Nerds is extremely empowering, because even if it's only one person, the ability to touch one person and contribute to their lives is something that just can't be bought. Either someone reads, watches, or listens and relates, and you just can't fabricate the community we promote. Sure, you can try making a blog about how someone love's to eat this candybar or drive that car, but it doesn't take long at all to see that such an attempt is fake at best.
Generation X is often labeled as despondent and hard to get to and such a statement is true if you don't understand what makes X tick. Generation Y is also labeled as unreachable to many brands and the problem is not in the generation, but in the thought process that goes behind trying to connect with people nowadays. Big corporations simply don't seem to understand that past methods simply don't and won't work. Well maybe they do, but from their attempts, you can easily see that they're clearly often thinking in mid-eighties theorems and just don't want to try and get today's consumers.
What does this have to do with blogging? All or nothing, you be the judge. But I do believe that many succesful things nowadays do actually have a stream of thought approach to them and a highly maleable sense of style. What won't change is that people for the most part want to be a part of a community, what has changed is that people want to be part of a larger group though maintaining their own would-be identity. Standing out through sheer excellence is still lauded, but standing out for just being different has or had become the norm. I say had because people are becoming so extreme in what they do that they are quickly running into homogeniety through their behavior. A pattern emerges, as it usually does and trends pop in and out according to theory. The difference nowadays is something I hinted at the other day. Permanence is something completely arbitrary and the illusion or goal for the eternal is every day more distant. Yet we all keep writing our thoughts in the hopes that something we say is a lot more permanent than any fashion style you could think of.
The beauty of it all is that our thoughts are recorded in these online text time capsules that we hope someone will open one day. We hope that what we have to say or at least part of it will mean something to someone in a few years' time though we much rather have permanence last a couple of decades before being forgotten.
You sit and read and can't help but think of the wonderful things people share, be it life experiences, personal triumphs, a growing family, a secret, a funny rant or something that flicks something in your brain and begs you to ask yourself just how what you're reading isn't being read by more people. You look at adverts and the New York Times best sellers list and wonder why some of the worthwhile things you read on a daily basis is lost to millions while crap that would serve best as kindling rakes in the money. You read magazine reviews and Rotten Tomato Aggregates and they pale in comparison to what you can read on some blogs with people like you that know how to write and share their thoughts and have their thumb, not on america's pulse, but yours.
We all read endless posts and rants from people who we'd love to share a beer with. Regardless of age, ethnicity, religion, gender or socio-economic status, the fact that we're entitled to opinions and that we can share them with people that might or might not relate makes it all worthwhile. How many hours do we spend looking for random things to post. How many posts have we written? How long do these posts take? For my part, this is the fourth year writing in this blog and I don't see myself writing any less. I see my posts, and supposed mini series taking different spins and going in different directions just to keep myself and anyone else interested in my crazy shit amused. From boxing reports, to music reviews, from little quirky one line shreds of knowledge to three page cuss filled rants. It's all part of expression in the name of connection and I'm grateful for every wonderful post I've read and every person who has been kind enough to comment on this teenie blog, link us up, and been in contact via email. It's surreal to be able to chat with people from Texas, Canada, Australia, India, Romania, St. Louis, Colorado, Washington State and everything in between. It's humbling because though this is a tiny blog, some people have found us worthy to be read, thought about, discussed and shared, and unlike webhits and dollars and noncents, it makes all the difference to us, because we're connected and you care, if only a little bit. So thank you, for reading, for writing, for linking and for connecting.
Cheers
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