The Shape of Days

Inspired by this blog post by a guy who’s writing about why he hates the blog on which his post appears, as well as a lot of the shit that’s happened in the past three years or so, I’ve been thinking for a few minutes about why blogs are fundamentally bad.

I think it’s because they promote a false egalitarianism that destroys our chances of passing wisdom on from one generation to the next.

Let me explain.

In our culture, we sanctify the written word. Maybe it’s true of all cultures; I really don’t know. But I know it’s true in our culture. The written word is true in a way that the spoken word isn’t. If some guy on the bus tells you his opinion of something, he’s just some random asshole. But if you read it in the paper or a book or a magazine, it’s the truth.

At least that’s how it used to be.

The printed word once had an air of authority in our culture. Maybe because among the first books to have been printed on a printing press was the Bible. The idea’s stuck with us through the past six hundred years that the product of the printing press is somehow more real, more concrete, than the words that come out of our mouths.

Today, publishing can be entirely automated. Anybody who wants to can publish his words on the Internet with absolutely no involvement from anybody else. It takes about ten minutes, and it costs nothing.

Most of the stuff people self-publish is innocuous. This is what I did today; I hate my Spanish teacher; my cat is pretty. Whatever.

But some of it’s utter bullshit. Measured not in terms of proportions but in absolute word count, a ton of it is utter bullshit.

And people are starting to catch on.

Blogs have come full-circle. In the fall of 2004, they were objects of ridicule. “A guy sitting in his pajamas,” and all that. What with one thing and another, blogs morphed into the foremost exemplar of the world-changing revolution in disintermediated communication. Now, thanks to a long-overdue reevaluation by the media-consuming public, they’re back to being objects of ridicule again. Nothing about blogs has changed; it’s just the consensus of opinion about them that’s changed.

Don’t get me wrong. This correction is good. All blogs, without exception, are shit, this one most definitely included. And the more people realize this the better. But along the way, we’re losing something important. We’re losing the sanctity of the written word.

There was a very brief time, mostly in the summer of 2005, when you could say “I read it on a blog” and not be laughed out of the room. Everybody took blogs seriously for a while, like they mattered, like they were somehow representative of the zeitgeist in a way that older media outlets never could be. Blogs became “true” while the printed word faded into irrelevance.

The pendulum has swung back, and now blogs once again are given an appropriate level of indifference by the media-consuming public. But the problem is the printed word has remained irrelevant. Blogs knocked journalism off of the pedestal, but failed to live up to the qualifications of that lofty position themselves. So we’re left with nothing. Nothing but a gaping hole filled with cynicism.

There is an argument to be made that civilization has advanced as far as it has as quickly as it has because we have developed a highly efficient method for communicating among ourselves. There’s been more change for the better in the past five hundred years than in all of the ten millennia of human history that preceded it, and the fact that this renaissance has taken place during the existence of the printing press and the written word is not coincidental. Taken as a whole, books are condensed wisdom, the very best thought and reflection and observation that humanity has produced, all written down and stored in one place. They’re the DNA of civilization. Books are how we pass on our essential nature to those who follow us.

But books are no longer condensed wisdom. They’ve been made secular, robbed of their special status. The guy who writes a book isn’t an author any more. He’s just some asshole sitting in his pajamas. Why should I listen to what some author has to say? Authors are just slow bloggers, and bloggers are jerks.

How will we ensure that our descendants are wiser than we are if we rob them of the cultural and intellectual birthright our parents enjoyed, and their parents, and all the parents all the way back to Gutenberg? How can we expect the volume of human wisdom to grow, for humanity itself to become smarter, if we embrace the notion that our own opinions are as valid as anybody’s, and you shouldn’t listen to that author/journalist/blogger because he’s just some asshole?

There was a time when natural barriers of economics and logistics made it difficult to get one’s words into print. Doing so was an investment, one that separated the great thinkers from the asshole on the bus. Now we’ve removed those barriers, and surprise surprise, a great flood of assholes have washed over us, spewing out their vomitous expectorations in a way that’s superficially indistinguishable from the great words of the great thinkers — assuming there are any left.

The naive respond by believing everything they read — or, God help us, watch on YouTube. The cynical shut their minds to all opinion and thought, acting on the entirely rational assumption that ninety-nine percent of everything they hear is bullshit.

As a result, we breed a generation made up of the foolish and the ignorant in equal proportions.

In his apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats wrote, “The best lack all convictions, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” That’s as accurate a description of our present state of affairs as any I can think of.

Of course, if Yeats were alive today he’d have a blog, and no one would read it, and all his wonderful, perfect words would fall on deaf ears, and in a week they’d be forgotten as the lidless public eye turns toward a picture of a cat next to a cheeseburger.

Surely some revelation is at hand.

• Hey, you didn’t blog at all on Thursday!
• Please surrender your principles to my all-important convenience
• Do what I mean.