Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”

Now available in a book

This article has now been published in a book, We’ve Got Blog (official site; Amazon). The version below is the original online posting; the book version is also available. (And people are still bitching about it.)

Rebecca Mead’s article “You’ve Got Blog” in the 2000.11.13 New Yorker (official version) on the blog-abetted romance of Jason Kottke and Meg Hourihan has finally put us Weblogger kidz on the map big-time. Now every damn milquetoast æsthete cursing himself for still being stuck working at the Barnes & Noble in Evanston, Reston, or Laramie will want to start his own blog. There goes the neighbourhood.

The article is excellent, full stop. Mead accurately, fairly, and indeed winsomely encapsulates the blogging phenomenon through the tried-and-true narrative device of personifying an abstract process with a hero (and heroine). In fact, Mead got so many things right that the story works on multiple levels; the knowing reader can identify a few truths our Barnes & Noble neophyte could not. Let’s explore, shall we?

1. The unbearable incestuousness of blogging: “The other people who have blogs... read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog.”
   • The nominal purpose of Weblogs is to point out links of interest that you, the reader, would not have run across yourself. A variant, as amply documented in Rebecca “Not Mead” Blood’s famous Weblog history, is the diaristic or daily-journal Weblog.
   • But since so many leading Weblogs are written by folks in the Internet biz, their entire lives are online. You can write up what you did with your real-life friend yesterday, but you can’t link to that experience. You can link to what your online friend blogged yesterday. The annotated-list-of-links Weblog form, then, becomes one and the same with the diaristic form for Webloggers in the Internet demimonde: Links are diaries because life is the Web.
   • This practice, however, defeats the original purpose of link-based Weblogging (to find fresh new items online) and the purpose of the later daily-journal variation, which lets perfect strangers peer into the fascinating or mundane lives of others, which they could not possibly know about by different means. Counterblogging fails the test of novelty two ways: The links aren’t fresh (they’ve been traded back and forth like saliva in a kiss) and no new events from bloggers’ real lives are depicted.
2. The A-List: “Jason Kottke... is widely admired among bloggers as a thoughtful critic of Web culture.... Getting blogged by Kottke, or by Meg Hourihan or one of her colleagues at Pyra, is the blog equivalent of having your book featured on Oprah.”
   • Finally, independent confirmation of an obvious fact that is self-servingly denied by the Weblog aristocracy itself: Despite no appreciable difference in the “thoughtfulness” of their respective Web criticism, some Webloggers are superstars.
   • The myth, of course, holds that all bloggers are equal, because we all can set out our wares on the great egalitarian Internet, where the best ideas bubble to the surface. This free-market theory of information has superficial appeal, but reality is rather different.
   • Jason’s commentary is quite good (Meg’s less so), but so is the commentary written by literally a dozen other bloggers I read, none of whom can create a miniature Slashdot effect by mentioning you. (I’m not citing any other bloggers here, by the way, whatever their fame or acumen. I’m limiting the name-dropping to the bloggers Rebecca Mead introduced into the discourse.)
   • Jason’s fame cannot be attributed solely to his cuteness (mentioned explicitly by Mead). I can think of two other A-list bloggers who are better-looking, not to mention having a bit more meat on the bones, and I am aware that there are a lot of attractive bloggeuses. Moreover, one A-list blogger is spectacularly ugly, but that has not impeded his star status.
   • Web-design skills cannot account for everything, either. Jason’s site, in its various forms, offers a middling level of programming complexity. Yet I can name three other A-list bloggers, and a far greater number digging for coal with their bare hands in the caverns of the net, whose sites are more complex and better-looking.
   • A small number of A-list bloggers run Weblogs that are effectively undesigned, a positioning statement that aims to showcase their ideas more prominently, but their ideas aren’t markedly superior to other bloggers’ in the first place.
   • Any way you cut it, there is no rational or even pseudo-rational explanation for the distribution of fame in the blog biz. Fame is like that.
3. Publicity stunt: On the topic of the relentlessly-counterblogged publicity stunt of the “memory” of a young girl riding her bicycle, Meg is quoted thus: “I was especially struck by the number of people who thought it was a big prank pulled by the ‘popular’ kids to make fun of the uncool kids.” That clearly was not the intent, but the effect was the same, highlighting the incestuousness and insularity of the crème-de-la-blogging-crème.
   • This raises the issue of in-jokes. Mead broadly implies that Meg and Jason were using their blogs to send coded messages to one another – ofttimes subconsciously. Very astute outside observers were able to put two and two together and infer that some kind of love was blossoming between the blogging dynamic duo. (The observers wouldn’t have gone to that trouble were Jason and Meg not A-list bloggers whose sites were scoured daily.)
   • The girl-on-a-bike prank was the rankest example yet of the mutual admiration society of the Weblog intelligentsia, deploying multiple identical coded messages – false memories of a little girl on a bicycle, duplicated by copy and paste, and not always even read all the way through – merely because they could.
   • The blogging/counterblogging form pretends to function as a conversation, but, unlike E-mail or instant messaging or any kind of threaded discussion forum, the effect is one of talking at people rather than with them. But you’re talking at them in public, rather like chatting on a cellphone at the mall, only in this case third parties stand a good chance of reading both sides of the conversation.
4. The Golden Age: Derek Powazek’s retrenchment from blogging “provoked a flurry of postings from neophyte bloggers, who feared they were facing the Twilight of Blogging before they had really had a chance to enjoy the Dawn of Blogging.” Setting aside for the moment that Powazek is now well and ably back in the blogging game (not true when the original article appeared), this entire question revolves around a single word: audience.
   • It is idealistic in the extreme to counsel bloggers not to concern themselves with an audience. The advice “Write for yourself,” while appropriate for a self-help course, applies poorly to the Web. Before the Internet, you could write all you wanted, but unless you had actual talent and enough persuasiveness to win over an editor, your work would go unpublished, and only you would ever read it.
   • Now, according to the egalitarian mythos of the Web, anyone can publish. You skip the step of requiring an editor and publisher, but no one is willing to skip the step of requiring an audience. Take it from someone who wrote since age seven and has been published in print nearly 400 times and an actual book: Few are the writers who do it for themselves. Even handwritten diaries will be discovered posthumously, as every diarist knows deep down.
   • These “neophyte” bloggers happen upon one of the automated Weblogging tools and discover with delight that another barrier has fallen – the need to learn HTML. And they see what the A-list kids are doing: The neophytes read all the preëminent Weblogs. (How could they miss ’em? They lead the “Other blogs” columns on hundreds of other sites.)
   • Quickly the culture of upward mobility is inculcated: If Jason Kottke can be famous and well-loved – living in Minnesota, for gosh sakes! – I can, too. Can’t I?
   • When a very-big-name blogger like Derek Powazek partially renounces the medium, to the neophyte blogger it’s like packing up and moving to hip, hot, sexy Prague only to find out it was actually a happening place two years ago, having taken that long for the happeningness to gain the attention of leading style magazines.
   • The fears of these neophyte bloggers are, in fact, entirely valid, but may require restatement. It’s not that you missed the Golden Age. It’s just that the age is golden only for other people. And there is pretty much no way to breach the velvet rope: If you’re not an A-list blogger, you will stay off that list forever. (Note that you can’t even really “marry into money,” as was possible in the olden days. Stars cavort with other stars, even in the most extreme cases: Elizabeth Taylor married actors twice as often as truckers. Jason Kottke moved across the United States for love of Meg Hourihan, not for some unsung woman who doesn’t even use a computer.)
   • The desire for approval is natural and human and should not elicit scorn. The desire for recognition is even more primal (“I exist. Talk to me”) and is to be encouraged. Yet Weblogging raises false hopes for both.
   • Recognition, in this case, is a synonym for audience, and, in the time-honoured tradition of starstruck social-climbers, the A-list bloggers are the ones with the biggest audiences, and everybody wants to be like them.
   • What the huddled masses yearning to blog their way into superstardom are left with, then, is not merely talking at people, but talking at a perennially minuscule group of people. It’s a source of frustration: It shatters the illusions of communication and dialogue, a shadow of which we notice when the A-list blithely blogs and counterblogs itself. The thinking is: “They get to have a semblance of a conversation [however illusory; see above], so why can’t we?”

“Yeah? So?”

Rebecca Mead quotes Jason Kottke: “He’d written that there were things going on in his life that were more personal than the stuff he usually wrote about in his Weblog. ‘Why don’t I just write it down somewhere private... a Word doc on my computer or in a paper diary?’ he asked himself, and his readers. ‘Somehow, that seems strange to me, though... The Web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those things elsewhere seems absurd.’ ” In the time-honoured tradition of documenting deep-seated feelings and experiences in plain public view, it’s time to explain why I wrote this companion piece.

You may think I’m jealous. Trust me, I’m not. Mildly envious, yes, but not jealous.

The straw that broke this camel’s back is the knowledge that all these A-list bloggers, and many of those unlucky enough not to be on that list, led well-funded and more or less rewarding lives in the Internet industry. How many times have you run across a blog posting like this one?

Rio just came out with a new MP3 player shaped like a walnut – and about the same size. They say it’ll sync with my Palm, which is too damn new for me to have synced it with my old Palm, let alone the Cube or the PowerBook. Anyway, something to pick up on Saturday morning.

I would be less inclined to complain if I were able to share in the Internet bounty in even the most trivial way. None of us Webloggers is particularly wealthy; few of us became dot-com millionaires. It’s just that everyone but me gets to make a living. It bugs me that the A-list kids are not really any smarter, or any better at Web design, or have anything particularly better to say than so many of the plebes. Their fame is inexplicable, but famous they are – and able to keep their heads above water. It’s the combination I resent.

Elizabeth Taylor was at least beautiful and could act, when not knocking back the sauce and buying diamonds by the barrel. What causes an anointed cadre of objectively undifferentiable Webloggers to be viewed as demigods escapes me. And it does in fact chafe against my egalitarian instincts. Many of us are as good as they are. (There. I put myself in one of the camps. And not the one that elicits profiles in the New Yorker.)

We can look forward to further triumphs and prosperity for Jason, Meg, Derek, and the other quarterbacks and cheerleaders of Weblog High. Successful people remain successful. If I could get a piece of that action, I’d be right in there rootin’ them on.

What people are saying

This article was nominated for a 2001 Bloggie. (Also nominated for giving birth to the meme the A-list. Lost both ways.) I enjoyed another superexclusive nomination in 2002. And lost.

This is a reasonably famous or notorious addition to the metablogging œuvre. The critics, as they say, are raving.

• “Somewhat self-important”
  – Dan Hartung

• “A steaming pile of crap”
  – Tom Coates

• “ ‘Grapes’... ‘sour’ ”
  – Jason Kottke

• “Just another lame ploy by a known hitslut”
  – Rebekah Jude Allen

• “This seems to me to be very astute”
  – Rebecca Mead

So, I mean, you tell me.

Updated 2002.12.28 ¶ 2007.07.15

You were here: fawny.org → Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog” (classic version)

See also: The book version