No, I admit it. Fair do. You've got me bang to rights. I've not been very good about keeping the blog going, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. And the reason I'm explaining whyI'm so remiss is because I'm getting reader mail asking me why I haven't updated my blog. (Or web site, come to that, but that's another matter.)
Some have also asked if I plan to Twitter. Not while I have my strength, as Blackadder would say.
Okay, the problem is this. While my political apoplexy is as froth-flecked as it ever was (more so, in fact) and there's a lot happening on the books front, I find I have no urge to blog about it.
The whole world seems to be set on transmit-only and doesn't seem to know where the receive button is. We not only have a blogosphere so crammed full of opinion that it's simply become a hum of white noise, but also - in the time I've been blogging - the emergence of the staggeringly pointless habit of Twitter (other microblogging time-wasting channels are also available etc etc etc) which I can only see as Twatter, on account of the fact that it seems to me the height of twattery. Seriously - whose life is really important enough to the planet for their every fart, purchase, and thought to be of vital interest to the masses minute-by-minute? Not mine, for a start.
I discussed this "I want to tell the world about ME!" obsession in society with a good buddy in the IT industry, and he said that it's the consequence of parenting styles of the 70s, 80s and 90s - that every child is a precious can-do-no-wrong snowflake to be indulged at all costs. He says it breeds a sense of self-importance and entitlement, a mindset that the whole world should find that person's minutest activity of riveting interest and value. My theory is the 180-degree opposite; that people know deep-down that they don't matter a rat's arse, and neither does their opinion, so they reassure themselves that they exist at all by posting crap into the ether in some kind of subconscious bid not for immortality but just to be noticed at all. I don't know who's right, maybe both or neither, but whatever the answer is I can do without reading/ hearing/ seeing this stuff, and the world can do without mine.
My buddy also thinks that Twatter and its kind, and social networking, will eventually go the way of CB radio. That's an interesting thought, although nobody will write an amusing song about it. What I find funny - in every sense - is that the same people who (rightly) fear the intrusion of our spying, lying government into our private lives are often the same ones who keep up a running commentary in public - be that on their cell phones, blogs, Facebooks or Twatter - about their every thought, movement, and action. Yes, it's by choice rather than surveillance, and we can assume informed consent for a given value of informed, but even so - it creases me.
I started blogging for a single specific reason; marketing. A good friend in the industry advised me to start a blog to build profile among readers, and as she knows what she's talking about, I took her advice. It was easy to churn out, it bridged the gap when I left the day job and no longer had helpless minions to expose to my daily tsunami of ire about the news of the day, and it worked. I was even offered gigs by editors who'd stumbled across the blog.
I wasn't getting paid for it, of course, which is a does-not-compute for a self-employed writer, but I was prepared to test it for cost-benefits. I'm still not sure it was worth it in strict business terms, although, as I said, I did get offered work directly from it. But I honestly don't know now what a blog can do for me and my customers that a web site can't do just as well. (One that I get around to updating, of course, but more on that below.)
And, like I say, the world and his dog is set on transmit-only these days. Some reflex in my brain makes me feel that anything I add is like spewing out greenhouse gases; just because my emissions are a small drop in the ocean, it doesn't mean that I shouldn't reduce them. I do more than enough transmitting in bookstores across the world, and that should be ample for anyone in this life.
So that's why I can't be arsed to blog lately. And I can't help thinking that if we did less blogging, Twattering, and opining - a word I will ban when I become Global Overlord, by the way - and more getting out, doing real stuff, and seeing life and lives for ourselves, then we'd be a saner species. In fact, I could have saved this whole page of effort by simply using the splendidly descriptive word coined by the excellent Register for the internet's outpouring of verbiage; Web2.0rhea.
As for the web site - I simply haven't updated it a lot because most of what I'm working on isn't public yet, and between the workload and family stuff, I'm snowed under. There's more Gears of War, Commando, and other material coming up, and it doesn't write itself. Well, not in that sense of the phrase, anyway.
UPDATE, 14/3/09
I concede that my IT buddy is probably right - the experts agree.
