The Blogosphere Isn't Broken: It Never Existed in the First Place

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photo by Blue Plover

If you ever see or hear me use the word blogosphere again, please throw ice cream in my face or something.

Why?

Because there really is no such thing as the or a blogosphere, and using the word perpetuates the myth and compounds the problems.

If you follow many writing blogs, you've probably notices a lot of hub-bub this week.  From responses to negative reviews, organized punking of supposed trolls, and controversies over  bogfests -- it seems that a great number of blogging writers this week have expressed their sadness and frustration with the blogosphere.  Some find it too given to a mob mentality.  Some find it too cliquish.  Some find it shallow.  Some find it cruel.

But the truth is that the blogosphere does not exist.  From a practical perspective, blogs are not contained or bounded in any way.  They are linked to one another, but they are also cross-linked with Facebook, Flickr, Panroa, YouTube, CNN -- everything else on the internet.    Sure, there are trends among similar blogs, but that's not surprising.  Bloggers with similar interests are going to show trends.  A trend is (essentially)  a coincidence of membership, not a delimiter of membership.  By using the word blogosphere we create the false impression of a bounded space, like a message board, a BBS, or an old-school AOL / CompuServe / Prodigy community.  It's nothing like that.

But more importantly, people refer to the blogosphere as if it were a community.  From an anthropological perspective, I'm here to tell you, it's not.  Not really.

Now, hold on.  Don't misunderstand.

I'm a huge believer in the power of social media and virtual relationships.  Skype let me talk to my brother-in-law on Christmas, even though he's at war overseas.  One of my oldest friends is someone I met on-line and have never met in person.  My wife and I, while most of our relationship developed face-to-face, had several important conversations in our relationship -- both serious and flirtatious -- through AIM.  Through Twitter and this blog, I have met several people that I consider great friends.  And, yes, through them, I am part of circles of friendship.

So don't think I'm saying something I'm not.

On-line relationships, both personal and professional, can be very helpful.  Very beneficial.  Very satisfying.  And very, very real.

But that does not mean that a bunch of blogs constitute a community.

In social science, an articulation is a point of contact.  There are several people with whom I have articulations on multiple blogs.  It's kind of lack having class with a lot of the same kids.  You can form relationship with some of those people -- though, in many cases, they are context-dependent relationships, and if you take away the context (the classes or the blogs), you also take away the relationships.

A community, though, is a social group, and there's more to a social group than points of articulation.  There's no simple definition of a community -- or of a social group -- but for the sake of ease I'm going to focus on aspect: in a community, the different people and their different relationships, serve different functions and perform different roles for one another, contributing as a sum to each member's overall life and well-being (or lack thereof).

Blogs aren't like that.  They cover a limited scope of interest, and impact a small piece of life.  Most people play pretty much the same role.  And everyone except the blog host/s occupy the same structure.  At it's worst, interconnected writing blogs are a a club.  At it's best, a peer group.

Anyone who has been a teenager knows that peer groups can be great, but they're not the same a community.

There's a last point to be made, too.  Blogs are not bloggers.  Just as you do not know a celebrity because of her performance, or an author because of his writing, or a band because of their songs, you do not know a blogger because of her blog.  You can learn about the blogger.  You may even use the blog as a launching point for further development of a relationship, in which you do know the blogger.  But knowing someone's blog really well, is not the same as knowing them.  I may get along with you great when you invite me to share a meal around your fire, but when you put the fire out and walk away, you feel no further relationship obligation to me.  My relationship is with your food and your fire, not with you.

Here's the point of all this:

Many of us expect too much out of blogs and out of bloggers.

1. Blogs are not part of a closed or even a defined system.

2. Blogs are not a community.

3. Having a relationship with a blog does not give you a relationship with the blogger.


If you want relationships with people you meet through blogs, that's awesome.  I am all in favor of using blogs as launching pads for meaningful professional and personal relationships.    But if you don't take the time to make a one-on-one relationship, you don't really have a relationship.  There's no social role or function to create the relationship like there is in a community.  The only way to create relationships is to seek them out, build them, and nurture them.  One on one.

.Nevets.

The Holy Grail: Blogging for Readers - You Can Be Perceval

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As I mentioned  in this post (go comment now -- there's a contest!), I am interested in blogging for readers, not just for other writers, though I appreciate all the writers who stop by and I hope even more do.  I think for many authors in the blogosphere this is held out as the unattainable dream.  We want a presence that attracts readers, we're told we need one, and yet we're told readers don't read author blogs.

I think it's doable, and I'm about to give you some tips, but first here are two more tips that may relieve some of your stress:

You really don't know how many readers are reading your blog.  I happen to know I have several readers who check my blog pretty regularly, but just never comment and don't sign up as followers.  They just bookmark the page or click through Twitter.

But if they read, why don't they comment?  Many authors track their success in terms of followers.  Some track their actual hits.  Some count comments.  Why would readers show up almost only as anonymous hits?

Writers write.  Readers read.  Yep.  You've read it hear first.  I'm being glib, but it's also true.  As writers it seems natural to express ourselves in writing.  For many readers, that is not the case.  Maybe this will help you.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has 2,451 reader reviews on Amazon.com.  Sounds like a ton of reader feedback, doesn't it?  Only... The book has sold an estimated 30 million copies.  Let's say 1% of those copies were sold through Amazon: 300,000.  May not be accurate, but it seems reasonable, given that their huge and increasing market share.  The 2,451 reviews would be less than 1% return on reader feedback.  If I get 2,500 visits a month, maybe that's 125 hits per blog post, and if I know that 75% of those are writers, then maybe I have 32 readers checking out each post.  And 1% of 32 is less than 1.  So if I never get a reader comment,  it's still within the percentages.

Don't get too caught up in the numbers.  The point is this: You may already have readers, and you may just not know it, and until you're famous and generating gabillions of hits, that's not surprising.


But, that said, there are some things that I have done and will be doing to increase my readership among non-writers.  You all can do these things, too


1) Be proactive about showing your well-roundedness.  I know a lot of writers who blog about broader topics of life and popular interest.  A couple of them use photos and tags in a way that might generate a few accidental web hits.  That's a bit of the battle, but here's the real secret to doing this: get out of the writing blogosphere.   Go read and comment on blogs associated with other hobbies you have and other interests of yours.  Be active outside of writing, and your readership will over lap.  Andrea Eames is excellent at this and she has one of the most diverse blog readerships I've come across.  She's a writer and she's into vintage clothes, and her blog is a place where the two communities overlap.

2) Be a font of cross-over information.  In case you're not, Clarissa Draper's blog overflows with information about the broad field of forensics, compiled for her own research and then posted for the public to use as a great starting point.   Every Monday, Lydia Kang features a new medical malady, condition, or procedure, each one crazier or more obscure than the last.  In both cases, most of the blog readers seem to be readers, but I always see a few comments from non-writers who just find the insight fascinating.   If a few are commenting, probably even more are reading.  These aren't accidental web hits, these are people who stay and return because the font of information appears predictable and bottomless.  I anticipate LT Host having similar success as she continues to develop her series on horses.

3) The internet is more than the blogosphere.  Maybe you don't "get" Twitter, or you see Facebook as a time-sink.  That's all well and good, but those are both great ways to reach out and make new net friends and contacts beyond the bubble.   I'm just now exploring how to use Facebook optimally, but most of my contacts there are and will always be most readers, several non-blogging writers, and a few from the blogosphere.  I've begun extending my Twitter chat out beyond the strict writing world and have made contact with people in comedy, martial arts and other areas of interest -- and they sometimes check in on my blog, and will be potential readers when I release stories.


4) Don't look for readers.  Just look for people.  Stop thinking about your writing career for a while.  Stop trying to enlist readers.  Stop trying to build awareness among potential reading populations.  Stop trying to build a dang platform.  Just.  Go.  Out.  And.  Meet.  People.   Seriously.  Check out of the writer's mindset, and just meet people.  They'll figure out that you blog.  And they'll check it out.  But stop trying to make it happen.  Just be yourself.


You really are pretty/handsome, and you're so smart and funny; if you're just yourself, I know they'll like you.


.Nevets.

Soundtrack for writing this post provided by Eric B and Rakim.

An Anthropologist-Writer's View on Writers and Social Ethics

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I've gotten into this conversation a few times on other blogs, but I don't think I have here, and I think it would be good to take a few moments to do that.  The topic comes up routinely: should a writer be allowed to portray folks from people of other cultures/races, or should they just write what they know?

I'm here to say, first of all, that, as a lover of freedom, I'm not in favor of any shouldn't placed on writers.  So the simplest answer is, yes, writers should be allowed to portray whomever they wish.

But I'm here to say, second of all, that the question not only presents a false dichotomy, but also misses an opportunity to engage writers in serious conversation about social ethics.

The false dichotomy is this: there are more than two choices here.  No fiction writer that I know only ever writes only things he or she knows directly from personal experience.  Most of us call on a mixture of things we know, things we think we know, and things we imagine.  There would be much less enjoyment for both readers and writers if we limited ourselves more strictly than that.  At the simplest, most stories include more than all female characters or all male characters.  So please don't cut off conversation by posing a question that does not exist.

And I do think there is an important conversation to be had here.  I'm not advocating censorship or even self-censorship, but I do believe in social ethics.  Anything ethical is an individual decision, so I'm not advocating a particular position here, but I am suggesting that if you're a writer, you owe it to yourself as part of your development to think about questions like these.

The idea of social ethics are, in large part, baggage I have brought with me from anthropology.    It's complex issue that defies full discussion in a single blog entry, but two main ideas that related to writing are this: (1) all communication takes place in two social contexts (in this case, that of the writer and that of the reader), each of which adds a layer of meaning onto all words and expressions; (2) any expression made in public space has an impact on unanticipated individuals.

In other words, it's all well and good for me to write whatever I want, but once I put it out there, other people are going to read it.  What are my obligations to those readers?  In the strictest sense, I have none.

But, as an anthropologist, I do believe that none of us are truly isolated, and that we exist in a complex web of society and culture, and I personally feel convicted to respect those relationships, no matter how intangible they may seem at times.

So what's an example of how social ethics impact my writing?

One of the biggest tenets of my own code of ethics as a writer is taken straight from my code of ethics as anthropologist.  It's okay for me to talk about, analyze, and portray folks from any culture to the best of my understanding.  It's not okay for me to assume a position in which I presume to speak for that culture.

In anthropology, we have two buzz words that describe how an individual perceives and describes a culture: etic, which is the descriptive outside view; and emic, which is the intimately understood inside view.   It is an anthropologists's goal to move from the etic towards the emic, trying to get more and more of an intimate knowledge of the culture through what we call participant observation (learning it by living it).  But when an anthropologist crosses the line and forgets that he is not actually of the other culture, he said to have "gone native."  The phrase is distasteful and I'm not fond of it, but the idea is that the anthropologist has lost his credibility and runs the risk of very likely offending both the culture he left and the culture he thinks he has joined.

It's a risk writers run when they write from another culture's stand-point and assume an advocacy position.  My point here isn't to criticize those authors, nor to speak out against such writing, per se.  My point is that, if an authors is going to do that, I hope the other is doing so thoughtfully, aware of the social implications.

And, then, if the author decides to do it, I would hope that they don't act surprised if they get flack for it.

Again, my intention here is not to stipulate any specific ethics for my fellow writers, but instead to encourage thoughtfulness about these things.  If we want to just write whatever, that's fine.  But once we put it out in public, I do believe that it behooves us and others if we put it out there thoughtfully.

So what do you the rest of you readers and writers think?

.Nevets.