Metablogging, part 2

[flanerieoconnor]

A few more thoughts I wanted to get down before moving on: I'm typing this right now on a notepad app open on a laptop computer. Last week, I was typing directly into the "post an entry" page on Dreamwidth. My thoughts then, I feel, came out as a bit of a jumbled mess, in large part because of the affordances of the technology itself: writing in a webpage with a box for text, and an "update" button at the bottom, makes it difficult to edit. There are few formatting options, the font of the text you're writing is small, and the text box itself occupies only a small portion of the total screen. Attempting to re-arrange the order of sentences, or re-write earlier portions while keeping later ones quickly becomes busy and confusing for the eye (as an example, I just skipped down several lines to try out a couple of versions of this sentence, before coming up with one I liked well enough to copy and paste back into the main body of text- easy enough on a word processing app, much less so in a text box). At one point, I was afraid I'd mistakenly deleted everything I'd written through an accidental click of an "undo" button. Everything about the design of an blog/social media update page encourages a kind of labored spontaneity of style- of recording thoughts just as they come, or seeming to do so, to the extent that re-writing or organizing my thoughts at all felt like I was somehow going against the grain or the "spirit of the thing" (without having any clear idea just what that "thing" might be). This is true, I suppose, of all digital-native genres and media, and even truer of later developments of "social media" than it was of the comparatively primitive blog- first twitter, optimized to be used via smartphone, so that you can record your internal monologue's presumed constant stream of spicy hot takes in real time (which feels to me like the reductio ad absurdum of what I've described above), and above all visually-oriented platforms where you curate your life through uploaded pictures (directly digitizing your visual experience of the world) or speak directly to a webcam. The ideal of web design pushes inclines naturally in this direction: rather than laboriously "composing" (in a discrete space like at a desk in an office), you're encouraged to instead effortlessly, frictionlessly, "update", from wherever you happen to be. Not particularly original thoughts, I know, but it was a little disturbing to me to realize how much of this is built into the very nature of writing on the internet. Even now, within my own head, I feel vaguely embarrassed at how long it's taken me to write this, still an internal voice saying "isn't this all kind of forced? Shouldn't it be easier?"

(Yes, I'm aware that this is all an illusion- that all blog posts worth reading are edited, instagram pictures elaborately staged, tweets workshopped in group DMs, etc- nevertheless, the effect one must strive to give in order to idiomatically produce "content" for the internet is one of studied nonchalance- one must appear frictionless. Also, the original version of this that existed in my head, before I tried to write it out, had a section on the ironic contrast between the silicon valley ethic of "mindfulness"- a kind of protestentized, Americanized ersatz Buddhism prone to metaphors about the mind as a clear, still pool or a steadily burning, flicker-less flame, and the effect given by reading a twitter thread transposed to a page as it it were a paragraph, which invariably reads like an amphetamine abuser in the midst of a manic episode- the apotheosis of monkey-mind. I wasn't sure how to work this into the rest, but I'm keeping it here for posterity. After all, no need to be too formal about this- I'm just writing down some thoughts, no?)