THANK YOU, Choire Sicha:

As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about “curation” replacing “creation” because, well, for starters, “curation” is choosing among things that are created? So like there’s nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it’s also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You’re in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you’re a low-gradecollector, not a curator. You’re buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you’re then reselling it on your blog. You’re nothing but a secondary market for someone else’s work.

Enough of the bullshit. Having a blog is and means nothing. You are not contributing to anything. You are not adding anything. Fucking around and smelling your own farts on Twitter and WordPress is not an accomplishment or unique talent, and the sooner people learn that the better.

It’s actually almost sickening: people who have accomplished little to nothing and have never put themselves out there for any sort of craft or practice prescribing depth and importance to themselves and their shitty, meaningless aggregation. See also: many reviewers on sites like Yelp. You have an interest and an opinion, not expertise. But that becomes easily confused with social media on the internet, which is to people with little in the way of self-awareness and personality what alcohol is to an alcoholic: a destructive escape for the reality they can’t deal with and Hell for everyone else around them.

There is nothing wrong with having a blog or a twitter. But there is something wrong with having a blog or a twitter and going on and on and on about it. ENOUGH!

 

4 Responses to Please Shut the Fuck Up About Your Blogs

  1. CRZ says:

    How courageous of you to….blog…this?

    • kevinmarshall says:

      When have you ever seen me talk of this blog in this manner or exhibit any of these characteristics at all? Or are you just trolling?

  2. Rob Madeo says:

    Indeed.

    I’m almost embarassed to tell people I have a blog. Yes, I appreciate the small circle of people who take the time to read it, but I don’t think it amounts to anything more than my randon BS observations about things nobody cares about. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Im the old days (1999?) people didn’t brag about keeping a journal or diary, or that they wrote short and pithy essays on the tiny thoughts running through their head. Then along came the internet.

    I actually had a blog once that lots of people read, and even though it’s been gone for six years, folks still mention it to me. Why? Because they work in the media and the blog was about them, so naturally they think it was significant. I try to tell them that it was just a buch of nonsense, but some of them still insist that it was important. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.

    But I still write. Why? Because I find it very satisfying to write something that I enjoy reading back to myself.  Some will say that makes me a narcissist. Oh, well.

    The good thing about blogs is that people write much more than they used to. That can’t be bad — but following the same logic,  just as bottled water has cured dehydration, blogs have cured illiteracy.

    • kevinmarshall says:

      Hear, hear.

      I remember when I was a teenager I used to think that the internet would make more people literate and, more importantly, better writers. I don’t think that’s happened, sadly.

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