There's a funny thing about a lot of blogs, and it annoys me. We call
it authorship, "writing a blog," but many, many blogs and websites are
actually collections of images with precious few words.
Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with images. Pictures are powerful, are arresting, are singular. They can do things that words cannot. But, to riff on the theme of an earlier post of mine, are they really worth a thousand words?
Perhaps a photograph is, particularly if it has real memories behind it. In a photograph, you can see what your grandparents looked like in 1950's Hawaii, better than you could ever imagine. A photograph can show you, my readers, what I saw in Versailles in much more detail than you could construe in your heads, unless you, too, have been there. Photographs are excellent for depicting outside things, for capturing a dynamic between people, or the exact look of a place.
But the interesting thing about the blog world is that so much of it is based on the dynamic inside our heads. It is usually one writer, one reader, both likely conducting their interaction silently. It is a one-on-one world, for the most part. Even the images on blogs are very often devoted to capturing someone's essence, to creating an image that supposedly expresses their inner self, and we as a society eat this up. Fashion blogs abound, where the only purpose is to show off your personal style. We have Tumblrs and Pinterest, especially in the female blogosphere, inundating our minds with image after image after image.
But do you ever log off of Pinterest or leave a favorite blog feeling tired, disappointed - bored? All those pictures that used to inspire me suddenly feel hackneyed, cliche. I forsake my old fashion muses every couple of years not because my fashion sense has grown, but because the blog I'm following hasn't. After a while, most image-based blogs and websites seem to develop a formula, and in turn this formula begins to show you not the inspiring, creative personality and artistry that you began following the blog for, but instead a typecast persona. You begin to recognize the bywords, the key pieces of the "look," and once you do this you can suddenly do a quick Google search and dredge up every other person on the planet who has chosen the same "type" or "persona" for her image.
Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with images. Pictures are powerful, are arresting, are singular. They can do things that words cannot. But, to riff on the theme of an earlier post of mine, are they really worth a thousand words?
Perhaps a photograph is, particularly if it has real memories behind it. In a photograph, you can see what your grandparents looked like in 1950's Hawaii, better than you could ever imagine. A photograph can show you, my readers, what I saw in Versailles in much more detail than you could construe in your heads, unless you, too, have been there. Photographs are excellent for depicting outside things, for capturing a dynamic between people, or the exact look of a place.
But the interesting thing about the blog world is that so much of it is based on the dynamic inside our heads. It is usually one writer, one reader, both likely conducting their interaction silently. It is a one-on-one world, for the most part. Even the images on blogs are very often devoted to capturing someone's essence, to creating an image that supposedly expresses their inner self, and we as a society eat this up. Fashion blogs abound, where the only purpose is to show off your personal style. We have Tumblrs and Pinterest, especially in the female blogosphere, inundating our minds with image after image after image.
But do you ever log off of Pinterest or leave a favorite blog feeling tired, disappointed - bored? All those pictures that used to inspire me suddenly feel hackneyed, cliche. I forsake my old fashion muses every couple of years not because my fashion sense has grown, but because the blog I'm following hasn't. After a while, most image-based blogs and websites seem to develop a formula, and in turn this formula begins to show you not the inspiring, creative personality and artistry that you began following the blog for, but instead a typecast persona. You begin to recognize the bywords, the key pieces of the "look," and once you do this you can suddenly do a quick Google search and dredge up every other person on the planet who has chosen the same "type" or "persona" for her image.
Think about it. You can get the HelloGiggles/New Girl/500 Days of Summer type, often known as the "manic pixie dreamgirl." You can get the one who posts pictures of broken dolls and Japanese kittens and blood and skulls. You can get the angry liberal feminist, the sweater-knitting Austenite, the high-fashion platform-heel New Yorker, the cheery sorority bopper, the trippy-hippie who makes her own facewash. I find it terribly frustrating that these are flattened into separate entities in media, whereas in real life they have a much greater tendency to coincide, at least in trace amounts, in the same person's life and image.
And then I wonder: would these images be so distinct if all we had were words?
Imagine each of these girls blogged only with words. You would, of course, still have typecasting. But would it be as strong? You see, I wonder if our modern brains aren't on image-overload to such a degree that we just qualify things and throw them into separate mental piles because we have to. If we didn't, we'd be overwhelmed by trying to process the thousand Instagrams and pinboards and blog posts that make up each personality's internet representation. We can't do it, as readers and viewers. And I have a suspicion that after a while the bloggers can't do it, either. Business or boredom sets in on their end, and, defeated by the sheer variety of images they are exposed to, the unlimited number of possible pictures to post or re-post, these bloggers begin to adopt a "type" at least semi-consciously.
Perhaps this is the nature of the beast. After all, besides private diaries and letters, no one has ever really tried keeping up a constant stream of engaging personal writing before. And the letters would not have been terribly interesting outside of the writer's rather immediate circle of acquaintances. As for the diaries, unless someone has curious and ill-mannered relatives with no self-restraint, a real personal diary is rarely of interest to anyone except dusty historians and other writers of sentences, stage, or screen, all of whom are born with a voyeuristic impulse that can never quite be content to inhabit merely the mind and the scenario it was given. Perhaps blogs will only hold human interest for so long, no matter what the combination of words and images. After all, if we read what even our favorite novelists wrote every day, sooner or later we would become privy to some boring, repetitious junk. No one can write great prose all of the time.
Still, it strikes me that prose writing has been the mainstay of storytelling for some centuries for a reason. Arguably, it has even held up better than film and television, because of it's ability to present both internal and external experiences without having to resort to symbolism or soliloquy. Picture books, in our society, are usually for children. They rely on a big, bright image on every page, to convey one idea, one sentence of captioning explanation, to ingrain one idea into a child's head. When authors want to break away from the one image, the one idea, the one-dimensional, they tend to include more words and fewer pictures. Overtime, the greatest stories of human life have been relayed in words. Words can be multifaceted and twisted, they can blend disparate elements, they can draw together a complex image that might actually contain more content, more emotion, and more reality than what anyone can shoot through a lens. Are they thoroughly superior? Of course not. But to my mind they allow for greater dimensionality and more divergence and variety in the image that an author creates. They are also easy. They require no camera, no lighting. And yet they are hard. You cannot Google search for exactly the right sentence, that one with just the feel you were looking for. Words have to be made anew more frequently than pictures, because you cannot find that exact sentence that you need. You might find a quote, perhaps a line or two, but the words of others are very difficult to integrate into your own writing, whereas the pictures of others can be dropped in at will. Copy, paste, add prior URL.
This is not to demean those who make their own photography and images, be they computerized or fine art. They work a miracle, and do a deed that few of us can do. They can take our breath away in an instant, with one glimpse, faster than any text. But can they keep us engaged? Rare is the picture that you really stare at for hours, though they do exist. Much more frequent the book we will devote hours to, even if the story is only mediocre. Human nature or culture, I don't know, but I do know that after a while, we crave more than images, images, images. We want to know what we're looking at, where it's from, when it was taken, who made it. Perhaps we will tire of all blogs in time, anyway. But perhaps the bloggers are not feeding us enough of their real complexities.
Perhaps, in a sea of images, we are missing a true image of the actual writers, as we would know them in person. If the internet is to be communication and connection, it must communicate more than stereotypes and adopted personas.
And so, in an instant world, I have chosen to fight the uphill battle and hope that people will take the time to read my words. They are not great ones, they are not timeless ones, and very likely you will all sometimes find them deadly dull ones. But I think in words, and I want to try to do more than adopt a persona and find a niche. I don't think that other bloggers mean to typecast themselves, but eventually it seems to happen, one way or another. I can't promise that it won't. But I can promise that I am not re-posting or pinning or insta-whatevering my words. If that's not enough to try to combat the flattening effect of the internet, then I don't know what is.
